Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster eBook.
Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books
from Simon & Schuster.
CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP
or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com
CONTENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATION
THE MAPS
1 The New World Order
2 The Hinge: Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson
3 From Universality to Equilibrium: Richelieu, William of Orange, and Pitt
4 The Concert of Europe: Great Britain, Austria, and Russia
5 Two Revolutionaries: Napoleon III and Bismarck
6 Realpolitik Turns on Itself
7 A Political Doomsday Machine: European Diplomacy Before the First
World War
8 Into the Vortex: The Military Doomsday Machine
9 The New Face of Diplomacy: Wilson and the Treaty of Versailles
10 The Dilemmas of the Victors
11 Stresemann and the Re-emergence of the Vanquished
12 The End of Illusion: Hitler and the Destruction of Versailles
13 Stalin’s Bazaar
14 The Nazi-Soviet Pact
15 America Re-enters the Arena: Franklin Delano Roosevelt
16 Three Approaches to Peace: Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill in World War II
17 The Beginning of the Cold War
18 The Success and the Pain of Containment
19 The Dilemma of Containment: The Korean War
20 Negotiating with the Communists: Adenauer, Churchill, and Eisenhower
21 Leapfrogging Containment: The Suez Crisis
22 Hungary: Upheaval in the Empire
23 Khrushchev’s Ultimatum: The Berlin Crisis 1958–63
24 Concepts of Western Unity: Macmillan, de Gaulle, Eisenhower, and
Kennedy
25 Vietnam: Entry into the Morass; Truman and Eisenhower
26 Vietnam: On the Road to Despair; Kennedy and Johnson
27 Vietnam: The Extrication; Nixon
28 Foreign Policy as Geopolitics: Nixon’s Triangular Diplomacy
29 Detente and Its Discontents
30 The End of the Cold War: Reagan and Gorbachev
31 The New World Order Reconsidered
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
PICTURE CREDITS
INDEX
To the men and women of the Foreign Service of the United States of
America, whose professionalism and dedication sustain American
diplomacy
List of Illustration
Page Woodrow Wilson addresses the Paris Peace Conference, January 25, 1919.
6
Page Washington’s Farewell Address, manuscript detail. Inset: George
10 Washington. Engraving after portrait by Gilbert Stuart.
Page The United Nations General Assembly.
17
Page Left: Theodore Roosevelt, August 1905. Right: Woodrow Wilson, July
29 1919.
Page Left: William of Orange. Right: Cardinal Richelieu.
56
Page Congress of Vienna, 1815.
78
Page Left: Otto von Bismarck. Right: Napoleon III.
103
Page Benjamin Disraeli.
137
Page Emperor William II and Tsar Nicholas II.
168
Page Left to right: Paul von Hindenburg, former Emperor William II, and Erich
201 Ludendorff, 1917.
Page Left to right: David Lloyd George, Vittorio Emmanuele Orlando, Georges
218 Clemenceau, and Woodrow Wilson at Versailles, 1919.
Page Left to right: Clemenceau, Wilson, Baron Sidney Sonnino, and Lloyd
246 George after signing the Treaty of Versailles, June 28, 1919.
Page Hans Luther, Aristide Briand, and Gustav Stresemann (right) with
266 German delegates at the League of Nations.
Page Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in Munich, 1937.
288
Page Joseph Stalin and aides at first session of Supreme Soviet. Deputies, from
332 left: Nikolai Bulganin, Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin, Kliment Voroshilov and
Nikita Khrushchev, January 26, 1938.
Page Vyacheslav Molotov signs Russo-German Nonaggression Pact, August
350 1939. In background are Joachim von Ribbentrop and Stalin.
Page Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill during Atlantic Charter
369 meeting, August 1941.
Page Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin at Yalta, February 1945.
394
Page Left: Churchill, Truman, and Stalin at Potsdam, 1945. Right: Clement
423 Attlee, Truman, and Stalin at Potsdam, August 1945.
Page John Foster Dulles with dignitaries after signing the Austrian State Treaty,
446 May 1955.
Page Dulles at the Korean front, June 1950.
473
Page Dwight D. Eisenhower and Churchill in London, 1959.
493
Page Khrushchev and Gamal Abdel Nasser in Moscow, 1958.
522
Page Hungarian street fighters during Budapest uprising, October 1956.
550
Page John F. Kennedy and Khrushchev in Vienna, June 1961.
568
Page Left: Kennedy and Harold Macmillan in Bermuda, December 1961. Right:
594 Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer in Bonn.
Page French infantry at Dien Bien Phu, April 1954.
620
Page Lyndon B. Johnson, December 1965.
643
Page Henry Kissinger and Le Due Tho in Paris, January 1973.
674
Page Leonid Brezhnev and Richard Nixon, June 1973.
703
Page Gerald Ford with Anatoly Dobrynin (left) and Leonid Brezhnev (right) at
733 Vladivostok, November 1974.
Page Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan in Geneva, November 1985.
762
Page Flags of the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, China, Russia,
804 Japan.
THE MAPS
French Expansion from 1648 to 1801 320
German Expansion from 1919 to 1939 321
William Ill’s Grand Alliance from 1701 to 1713 322
Alliances in the 1950s 323
Europe After the Congress of Vienna, 1815 324
Europe on the Eve of the First World War, 1914 326
The Cold War World from 1945 to 1989 328
The Post-Cold War World 330
POWER VACUUMS Both the Peace of Westphalia (1648) and the Treaty of Versailles (1919) created
power vacuums on the borders of military heavyweights. The stronger powers—Louis XIV’s France and
Hitler’s Germany—found the temptation to expand at the expense of weaker neighbors irresistible.
CONTAINMENT OLD AND NEW In order to rein in chronically expansionist powers, William III of
England built a “Grand Alliance” to “contain” France’s outward thrusts. The United States similarly built a
system of alliances to contain the Soviet Union in the 1950s.
BALANCE OF POWER AND THE CONGRESS SYSTEM The peacemakers at Vienna consolidated
Central Europe into the German Confederation, ending the power vacuum which had tempted French
expansionism. The Quadruple Alliance was formed to block French aggression. European congresses, the
last of which was held in Berlin in 1878, met periodically to sort out solutions to Europe’s major conflicts.
THE BALANCE OF POWER PETRIFIES When war broke out in 1914, the Franco-Russian Alliance was
already twenty-three years old, and the Austro-German Alliance was thirtv-five years old. A newcomer to
Continental alliances. Great Britain joined the Franco-Russian bloc with agreements in 1904 and 1907.
Both alliances were entangled in Europe’s trouble spots, most fatefully in the Balkans, so that a minor
conflict had the potential to draw all the Great Powers into war.
COLD WAR SPHERES OF INFLUENCE In the years following 1945, the United States and the Soviet
Union established spheres of influence in Europe. In the 1950s, spheres were consolidated in Northeast
Asia. In the 1960s, the theater of competition moved to Southeast Asia, where spheres were eventually
consolidated. In the 1970s, the two superpowers battled for influence in the Middle East and Africa; in the
1980s, in Central America.
THE POST-COLD WAR WORLD With the collapse of the Soviet sphere of influence in 1989, new
instability has emerged in Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Persian Gulf, the Horn of Africa, and the Balkans.
In the meantime, new power centers have developed in Japan, China, and Western Europe, making for a
multipolar world.
CHAPTER ONE
The New World Order
Almost as if according to some natural law, in every century there seems to
emerge a country with the power, the will, and the intellectual and moral impetus
to shape the entire international system in accordance with its own values. In the
seventeenth century, France under Cardinal Richelieu introduced the modern
approach to international relations, based on the nation-state and motivated by
national interest as its ultimate purpose. In the eighteenth century, Great Britain
elaborated the concept of the balance of power, which dominated European
diplomacy for the next 200 years. In the nineteenth century, Metternich’s Austria
reconstructed the Concert of Europe and Bismarck’s Germany dismantled it,
reshaping European diplomacy into a coldblooded game of power politics.
In the twentieth century, no country has influenced international relations as
decisively and at the same time as ambivalently as the United States. No society
has more firmly insisted on the inadmissibility of intervention in the domestic
affairs of other states, or more passionately asserted that its own values were
universally applicable. No nation has been more pragmatic in the day-to-day
conduct of its diplomacy, or more ideological in the pursuit of its historic moral
convictions. No country has been more reluctant to engage itself abroad even
while undertaking alliances and commitments of unprecedented reach and scope.
The singularities that America has ascribed to itself throughout its history
have produced two contradictory attitudes toward foreign policy. The first is that
America serves its values best by perfecting democracy at home, thereby acting
as a beacon for the rest of mankind; the second, that America’s values impose on
it an obligation to crusade for them around the world. Torn between nostalgia for
a pristine past and yearning for a perfect future, American thought has oscillated
between isolationism and commitment, though, since the end of the Second
World War, the realities of interdependence have predominated.
Both schools of thought—of America as beacon and of America as crusader—
envision as normal a global international order based on democracy, free
commerce, and international law. Since no such system has ever existed, its
evocation often appears to other societies as utopian, if not naïve. Still, foreign
skepticism never dimmed the idealism of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt,
or Ronald Reagan, or indeed of all other twentieth-century American presidents.
If anything, it has spurred America’s faith that history can be overcome and that
if the world truly wants peace, it needs to apply America’s moral prescriptions.
Both schools of thought were products of the American experience. Though
other republics have existed, none had been consciously created to vindicate the
idea of liberty. No other country’s population had chosen to head for a new
continent and tame its wilderness in the name of freedom and prosperity for all.
Thus the two approaches, the isolationist and the missionary, so contradictory on
the surface, reflected a common underlying faith: that the United States
possessed the world’s best system of government, and that the rest of mankind
could attain peace and prosperity by abandoning traditional diplomacy and
adopting America’s reverence for international law and democracy.
America’s journey through international politics has been a triumph of faith
over experience. Since the time America entered the arena of world politics in
1917, it has been so preponderant in strength and so convinced of the rightness
of its ideals that this century’s major international agreements have been
embodiments of American values—from the League of Nations and the KelloggBriand Pact to the United Nations Charter and the Helsinki Final Act. The
collapse of Soviet communism marked the intellectual vindication of American
ideals and, ironically, brought America face to face with the kind of world it had
been seeking to escape throughout its history. In the emerging international
order, nationalism has gained a new lease on life. Nations have pursued selfinterest more frequently than high-minded principle, and have competed more
than they have cooperated. There is little evidence to suggest that this age-old
mode of behavior has changed, or that it is likely to change in the decades ahead.
What is new about the emerging world order is that, for the first time, the
United States can neither withdraw from the world nor dominate it. America
cannot change the way it has perceived its role throughout its history, nor should
it want to. When America entered the international arena, it was young and
robust and had the power to make the world conform to its vision of
international relations. By the end of the Second World War in 1945, the United
States was so powerful (at one point about 35 percent of the world’s entire
economic production was American) that it seemed as if it was destined to shape
the world according to its preferences.
John F. Kennedy declared confidently in 1961 that America was strong
enough to “pay any price, bear any burden” to ensure the success of liberty.
Three decades later, the United States is in less of a position to insist on the
immediate realization of all its desires. Other countries have grown into Great
Power status. The United States now faces the challenge of reaching its goals in
stages, each of which is an amalgam of American values and geopolitical
necessities. One of the new necessities is that a world comprising several states
of comparable strength must base its order on some concept of equilibrium—an
idea with which the United States has never felt comfortable.
When American thinking on foreign policy and European diplomatic
traditions encountered each other at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, the
differences in historical experience became dramatically evident. The European
leaders sought to refurbish the existing system according to familiar methods;
the American peacemakers believed that the Great War had resulted not from
intractable geopolitical conflicts but from flawed European practices. In his
famous Fourteen Points, Woodrow Wilson told the Europeans that, henceforth,
the international system should be based not on the balance of power but on
ethnic self-determination, that their security should depend not on military
alliances but on collective security, and that their diplomacy should no longer be
conducted secretly by experts but on the basis of “open agreements, openly
arrived at.” Clearly, Wilson had come not so much to discuss the terms for
ending a war or for restoring the existing international order, as he had to recast a
whole system of international relations as it had been practiced for nearly three
centuries.
For as long as Americans have been reflecting on foreign policy, they have
ascribed Europe’s travails to the balance-of-power system. And since the time
Europe first had to concern itself with American foreign policy, its leaders have
looked askance at America’s self-appointed mission of global reform. Each side
has behaved as if the other had freely chosen its mode of diplomatic behavior
and could have, were it wiser or less bellicose, selected some other, more
agreeable, method.
In fact, both the American and the European approaches to foreign policy
were the products of their own unique circumstances. Americans inhabited a
nearly empty continent shielded from predatory powers by two vast oceans and
with weak countries as neighbors. Since America confronted no power in need
of being balanced, it could hardly have occupied itself with the challenges of
equilibrium even if its leaders had been seized by the bizarre notion of
replicating European conditions amidst a people who had turned their backs on
Europe.
The anguishing dilemmas of security that tormented European nations did not
touch America for nearly 150 years. When they did, America twice participated
in the world wars which had been started by the nations of Europe. In each
instance, by the time America got involved, the balance of power had already
failed to operate, producing this paradox: that the balance of power, which most
Americans disdained, in fact assured American security as long as it functioned
as it was designed; and that it was its breakdown that drew America into
international politics.
The nations of Europe did not choose the balance of power as the means for
regulating their relations out of innate quarrelsomeness or an Old World love of
intrigue. If the emphasis on democracy and international law was the product of
America’s unique sense of security, European diplomacy had been forged in the
school of hard knocks.
Europe was thrown into balance-of-power politics when its first choice, the
medieval dream of universal empire, collapsed and a host of states of more or
less equal strength arose from the ashes of that ancient aspiration. When a group
of states so constituted are obliged to deal with one another, there are only two
possible outcomes: either one state becomes so strong that it dominates all the
others and creates an empire, or no state is ever quite powerful enough to
achieve that goal. In the latter case, the pretensions of the most aggressive
member of the international community are kept in check by a combination of
the others; in other words, by the operation of a balance of power.
The balance-of-power system did not purport to avoid crises or even wars.
When working properly, it was meant to limit both the ability of states to
dominate others and the scope of conflicts. Its goal was not peace so much as
stability and moderation. By definition, a balance-of-power arrangement cannot
satisfy every member of the international system completely; it works best when
it keeps dissatisfaction below the level at which the aggrieved party will seek to
overthrow the international order.
Theorists of the balance of power often leave the impression that it is the
natural form of international relations. In fact, balance-of-power systems have
existed only rarely in human history. The Western Hemisphere has never known
one, nor has the territory of contemporary China since the end of the period of
the warring states, over 2,000 years ago. For the greatest part of humanity and
the longest periods of history, empire has been the typical mode of government.
Empires have no interest in operating within an international system; they aspire
to be the international system. Empires have no need for a balance of power.
That is how the United States has conducted its foreign policy in the Americas,
and China through most of its history in Asia.
In the West, the only examples of functioning balance-of-power systems were
among the city-states of ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy, and the European
state system which arose out of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. The
distinguishing feature of these systems was to elevate a fact of life—the
existence of a number of states of substantially equal strength—into a guiding
principle of world order.
Intellectually, the concept of the balance of power reflected the convictions of
all the major political thinkers of the Enlightenment. In their view, the universe,
including the political sphere, operated according to rational principles which
balanced each other. Seemingly random acts by reasonable men would, in their
totality, tend toward the common good, though the proof of this proposition was
elusive in the century of almost constant conflict that followed the Thirty Years’
War.
Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, maintained that an “invisible hand”
would distill general economic well-being out of selfish individual economic
actions. In The Federalist Papers, Madison argued that, in a large enough
republic, the various political “factions” selfishly pursuing their own interests
would, by a kind of automatic mechanism, forge a proper domestic harmony.
The concepts of the separation of powers and of checks and balances, as
conceived by Montesquieu and embodied in the American Constitution,
reflected an identical view. The purpose of the separation of powers was to avoid
despotism, not to achieve harmonious government; each branch of the
government, in the pursuit of its own interests, would restrain excess and thereby
serve the common good. The same principles were applied to international
affairs. By pursuing its own selfish interests, each state was presumed to
contribute to progress, as if some unseen hand were guaranteeing that freedom
of choice for each state assured well-being for all.
For over a century, this expectation seemed to be fulfilled. After the
dislocations caused by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, the
leaders of Europe restored the balance of power at the Congress of Vienna in
1815 and softened the brutal reliance on power by seeking to moderate
international conduct through moral and legal bonds. Yet by the end of the
nineteenth century, the European balance-of-power system returned to the
principles of power politics and in a far more unforgiving environment. Facing
down the adversary became the standard method of diplomacy, leading to one
test of strength after another. Finally, in 1914, a crisis arose from which no one
shrank. Europe never fully recovered world leadership after the catastrophe of
the First World War. The United States emerged as the dominant player but
Woodrow Wilson soon made it clear that his country refused to play by
European rules.
At no time in its history has America participated in a balance-of-power
system. Before the two world wars, America benefited from the operation of the
balance of power without being involved in its maneuvers, and while enjoying
the luxury of castigating it at will. During the Cold War, America was engaged
in an ideological, political, and strategic struggle with the Soviet Union in which
a two-power world operated according to principles quite different from those of
a balance-of-power system. In a two-power world, there can be no pretense that
conflict leads to the common good; any gain for one side is a loss for the other.
Victory without war was in fact what America achieved in the Cold War, a
victory which has now obliged it to confront the dilemma described by George
Bernard Shaw: “There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s
desire. The other is to gain it.”
American leaders have taken their values so much for granted that they rarely
recognize how revolutionary and unsettling these values can appear to others. No
other society has asserted that the principles of ethical conduct apply to
international conduct in the same way that they do to the individual—a notion
that is the exact opposite of Richelieu’s raison d’état. America has maintained
that the prevention of war is as much a legal as a diplomatic challenge, and that
what it resists is not change as such but the method of change, especially the use
of force. A Bismarck or a Disraeli would have ridiculed the proposition that
foreign policy is about method rather than substance, if indeed he had
understood it. No nation has ever imposed the moral demands on itself that
America has. And no country has so tormented itself over the gap between its
moral values, which are by definition absolute, and the imperfection inherent in
the concrete situations to which they must be applied.
During the Cold War, the unique American approach to foreign policy was
remarkably appropriate to the challenge at hand. There was a deep ideological
conflict, and only one country, the United States, possessed the full panoply of
means—political, economic, and military—to organize the defense of the
noncommunist world. A nation in such a position is able to insist on its views
and can often avoid the problem facing the statesmen of less favored societies:
that their means oblige them to pursue goals less ambitious than their hopes, and
that their circumstances require them to approach even those goals in stages.
In the Cold War world, the traditional concepts of power had substantially
broken down. Most of history has displayed a synthesis of military, political, and
economic strength, which in general has proved to be symmetrical. In the Cold
War period, the various elements of power became quite distinct. The former
Soviet Union was a military superpower and at the same time an economic
dwarf. It was also possible for a country to be an economic giant but to be
militarily irrelevant, as was the case with Japan.
In the post-Cold War world, the various elements are likely to grow more
congruent and more symmetrical. The relative military power of the United
States will gradually decline. The absence of a clearcut adversary will produce
domestic pressure to shift resources from defense to other priorities—a process
which has already started. When there is no longer a single threat and each
country perceives its perils from its own national perspective, those societies
which had nestled under American protection will feel compelled to assume
greater responsibility for their own security. Thus, the operation of the new
international system will move toward equilibrium even in the military field,
though it may take some decades to reach that point. These tendencies will be
even more pronounced in economics, where American predominance is already
declining, and where it has become safer to challenge the United States.
The international system of the twenty-first century will be marked by a
seeming contradiction: on the one hand, fragmentation; on the other, growing
globalization. On the level of the relations among states, the new order will be
more like the European state system of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
than the rigid patterns of the Cold War. It will contain at least six major powers
—the United States, Europe, China, Japan, Russia, and probably India—as well
as a multiplicity of medium-sized and smaller countries. At the same time,
international relations have become truly global for the first time.
Communications are instantaneous; the world economy operates on all
continents simultaneously. A whole set of issues has surfaced that can only be
dealt with on a worldwide basis, such as nuclear proliferation, the environment,
the population explosion, and economic interdependence.
For America, reconciling differing values and very different historical
experiences among countries of comparable significance will be a novel
experience and a major departure from either the isolation of the last century or
the de facto hegemony of the Cold War, in ways which this book seeks to
illuminate. Equally, the other major players are facing difficulties in adjusting to
the emerging world order.
Europe, the only part of the modern world ever to operate a multistate system,
invented the concepts of the nation-state, sovereignty, and the balance of power.
These ideas dominated international affairs for the better part of three centuries.
But none of Europe’s erstwhile practitioners of raison d’état are now strong
enough to act as principals in the emerging international order. They are
attempting to compensate for this relative weakness by creating a unified
Europe, an effort which absorbs much of their energies. But even if they were to
succeed, no automatic guidelines for the conduct of a unified Europe on the
global stage would be at hand, since such a political entity has never existed
before.
Throughout its history, Russia has been a special case. It arrived late on the
European scene—well after France and Great Britain had been consolidated—
and none of the traditional principles of European diplomacy seemed to apply to
it. Bordering on three different cultural spheres—Europe, Asia, and the Muslim
world—Russia contained populations of each, and hence was never a national
state in the European sense. Constantly changing shape as its rulers annexed
contiguous territories, Russia was an empire out of scale in comparison with any
of the European countries. Moreover, with every new conquest, the character of
the state changed as it incorporated another brand-new, restive, non-Russian
ethnic group. This was one of the reasons Russia felt obliged to maintain huge
armies whose size was unrelated to any plausible threat to its external security.
Torn between obsessive insecurity and proselytizing zeal, between the
requirements of Europe and the temptations of Asia, the Russian Empire always
had a role in the European equilibrium but was never emotionally a part of it.
The requirements of conquest and of security became merged in the minds of
Russian leaders. Since the Congress of Vienna, the Russian Empire has placed
its military forces on foreign soil more often than any other major power.
Analysts frequently explain Russian expansionism as stemming from a sense of
insecurity. But Russian writers have far more often justified Russia’s outward
thrust as a messianic vocation. Russia on the march rarely showed a sense of
limits; thwarted, it tended to withdraw into sullen resentment. For most of its
history, Russia has been a cause looking for opportunity.
Postcommunist Russia finds itself within borders which reflect no historical
precedent. Like Europe, it will have to devote much of its energy to redefining
its identity. Will it seek to return to its historical rhythm and restore the lost
empire? Will it shift its center of gravity eastward and become a more active
participant in Asian diplomacy? By what principles and methods will it react to
the upheavals around its borders, especially in the volatile Middle East? Russia
will always be essential to world order and, in the inevitable turmoil associated
with answering these questions, a potential menace to it.
China too faces a world order that is new to it. For 2,000 years, the Chinese
Empire had united its world under a single imperial rule. To be sure, that rule
had faltered at times. Wars occurred in China no less frequently than they did in
Europe. But since they generally took place among contenders for the imperial
authority, they were more in the nature of civil rather than international wars,
and, sooner or later, invariably led to the emergence of some new central power.
Before the nineteenth century, China never had a neighbor capable of
contesting its preeminence and never imagined that such a state could arise.
Conquerors from abroad overthrew Chinese dynasties, only to be absorbed into
Chinese culture to such an extent that they continued the traditions of the Middle
Kingdom. The notion of the sovereign equality of states did not exist in China;
outsiders were considered barbarians and were relegated to a tributary
relationship—that was how the first British envoy to Beijing was received in the
eighteenth century. China disdained sending ambassadors abroad but was not
above using distant barbarians to overcome the ones nearby. Yet this was a
strategy for emergencies, not a day-to-day operational system like the European
balance of power, and it failed to produce the sort of permanent diplomatic
establishment characteristic of Europe. After China became a humiliated subject
of European colonialism in the nineteenth century, it re-emerged only recently—
since the Second World War—into a multipolar world unprecedented in its
history.
Japan had also cut itself off from all contact with the outside world. For 500
years before it was forcibly opened by Commodore Matthew Perry in 1854,
Japan did not even deign to balance the barbarians off against each other or to
invent tributary relationships, as the Chinese had. Closed off from the outside
world, Japan prided itself on its unique customs, gratified its military tradition by
civil war, and rested its internal structure on the conviction that its unique culture
was impervious to foreign influence, superior to it, and, in the end, would defeat
it rather than absorb it.
In the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was the dominant security threat,
Japan was able to identify its foreign policy with America, thousands of miles
away. The new world order, with its multiplicity of challenges, will almost
certainly oblige a country with so proud a past to re-examine its reliance on a
single ally. Japan is bound to become more sensitive to the Asian balance of
power than is possible for America, in a different hemisphere and facing in three
directions—across the Atlantic, across the Pacific, and toward South America.
China, Korea, and Southeast Asia will acquire quite a different significance for
Japan than for the United States, and will inaugurate a more autonomous and
more self-reliant Japanese foreign policy.
As for India, which is now emerging as the major power in South Asia, its
foreign policy is in many ways the last vestige of the heyday of European
imperialism, leavened by the traditions of an ancient culture. Before the arrival
of the British, the subcontinent had not been ruled as a single political unit for
millennia. British colonization was accomplished with small military forces
because, at first, the local population saw these as the replacement of one set of
conquerors by another. But after it established unified rule, the British Empire
was undermined by the very values of popular government and cultural
nationalism it had imported into India. Yet, as a nation-state, India is a
newcomer. Absorbed by the struggle to feed its vast population, India dabbled in
the Nonaligned movement during the Cold War. But it has yet to assume a role
commensurate with its size on the international political stage.
Thus, in effect, none of the most important countries which must build a new
world order have had any experience with the multistate system that is emerging.
Never before has a new world order had to be assembled from so many different
perceptions, or on so global a scale. Nor has any previous order had to combine
the attributes of the historic balance-of-power systems with global democratic
opinion and the exploding technology of the contemporary period.
In retrospect, all international systems appear to have an inevitable symmetry.
Once they are established, it is difficult to imagine how history might have
evolved had other choices been made, or indeed whether any other choices had
been possible. When an international order first comes into being, many choices
may be open to it. But each choice constricts the universe of remaining options.
Because complexity inhibits flexibility, early choices are especially crucial.
Whether an international order is relatively stable, like the one that emerged
from the Congress of Vienna, or highly volatile, like those that emerged from the
Peace of Westphalia and the Treaty of Versailles, depends on the degree to which
they reconcile what makes the constituent societies feel secure with what they
consider just.
The two international systems that were the most stable—that of the Congress
of Vienna and the one dominated by the United States after the Second World
War—had the advantage of uniform perceptions. The statesmen at Vienna were
aristocrats who saw intangibles in the same way, and agreed on fundamentals;
the American leaders who shaped the postwar world emerged from an
intellectual tradition of extraordinary coherence and vitality.
The order that is now emerging will have to be built by statesmen who
represent vastly different cultures. They run huge bureaucracies of such
complexity that, often, the energy of these statesmen is more consumed by
serving the administrative machinery than by defining a purpose. They rise to
eminence by means of qualities that are not necessarily those needed to govern,
and are even less suited to building an international order. And the only available
model of a multistate system was one built by Western societies, which many of
the participants may reject.
Yet the rise and fall of previous world orders based on many states—from the
Peace of Westphalia to our time—is the only experience on which one can draw
in trying to understand the challenges facing contemporary statesmen. The study
of history offers no manual of instructions that can be applied automatically;
history teaches by analogy, shedding light on the likely consequences of
comparable situations. But each generation must determine for itself which
circumstances are in fact comparable.
Intellectuals analyze the operations of international systems; statesmen build
them. And there is a vast difference between the perspective of an analyst and
that of a statesman. The analyst can choose which problem he wishes to study,
whereas the statesman’s problems are imposed on him. The analyst can allot
whatever time is necessary to come to a clear conclusion; the overwhelming
challenge to the statesman is the pressure of time. The analyst runs no risk. If his
conclusions prove wrong, he can write another treatise. The statesman is
permitted only one guess; his mistakes are irretrievable. The analyst has
available to him all the facts; he will be judged on his intellectual power. The
statesman must act on assessments that cannot be proved at the time that he is
making them; he will be judged by history on the basis of how wisely he
managed the inevitable change and, above all, by how well he preserves the
peace. That is why examining how statesmen have dealt with the problem of
world order—what worked or failed and why—is not the end of understanding
contemporary diplomacy, though it may be its beginning.
CHAPTER TWO
The Hinge: Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow
Wilson
Until early in this century, the isolationist tendency prevailed in American
foreign policy. Then, two factors projected America into world affairs: its rapidly
expanding power, and the gradual collapse of the international system centered
on Europe. Two watershed presidencies marked this progression: Theodore
Roosevelt’s and Woodrow Wilson’s. These men held the reins of government
when world affairs were drawing a reluctant nation into their vortex. Both
recognized that America had a crucial role to play in world affairs though they
justified its emergence from isolation with opposite philosophies.
Roosevelt was a sophisticated analyst of the balance of power. He insisted on
an international role for America because its national interest demanded it, and
because a global balance of power was inconceivable to him without American
participation. For Wilson, the justification of America’s international role was
messianic: America had an obligation, not to the balance of power, but to spread
its principles throughout the world. During the Wilson Administration, America
emerged as a key player in world affairs, proclaiming principles which, while
reflecting the truisms of American thought, nonetheless marked a revolutionary
departure for Old World diplomats. These principles held that peace depends on
the spread of democracy, that states should be judged by the same ethical criteria
as individuals, and that the national interest consists of adhering to a universal
system of law.
To hardened veterans of a European diplomacy based on the balance of power,
Wilson’s views about the ultimately moral foundations of foreign policy
appeared strange, even hypocritical. Yet Wilsonianism has survived while
history has bypassed the reservations of his contemporaries. Wilson was the
originator of the vision of a universal world organization, the League of Nations,
which would keep the peace through collective security rather than alliances.
Though Wilson could not convince his own country of its merit, the idea lived
on. It is above all to the drumbeat of Wilsonian idealism that American foreign
policy has marched since his watershed presidency, and continues to march to
this day.
America’s singular approach to international affairs did not develop all at
once, or as the consequence of a solitary inspiration. In the early years of the
Republic, American foreign policy was in fact a sophisticated reflection of the
American national interest, which was, simply, to fortify the new nation’s
independence. Since no European country was capable of posing an actual threat
so long as it had to contend with rivals, the Founding Fathers showed themselves
quite ready to manipulate the despised balance of power when it suited their
needs; indeed, they could be extraordinarily skillful at maneuvering between
France and Great Britain not only to preserve America’s independence but to
enlarge its frontiers. Because they really wanted neither side to win a decisive
victory in the wars of the French Revolution, they declared neutrality. Jefferson
defined the Napoleonic Wars as a contest between the tyrant on the land (France)
and the tyrant of the ocean (England)1—in other words, the parties in the
European struggle were morally equivalent. Practicing an early form of
nonalignment, the new nation discovered the benefit of neutrality as a bargaining
tool, just as many an emerging nation has since.
At the same time, the United States did not carry its rejection of Old World
ways to the point of forgoing territorial expansion. On the contrary, from the
very beginning, the United States pursued expansion in the Americas with
extraordinary singleness of purpose. After 1794, a series of treaties settled the
borders with Canada and Florida in America’s favor, opened the Mississippi
River to American trade, and began to establish an American commercial
interest in the British West Indies. This culminated in the Louisiana Purchase of
1803, which brought to the young country a huge, undefined territory west of the
Mississippi River from France along with claims to Spanish territory in Florida
and Texas—the foundation from which to develop into a great power.
The French leader who made the sale, Napoleon Bonaparte, advanced an Old
World explanation for such a one-sided transaction: “This accession of territory
affirms forever the power of the United States, and I have just given England a
maritime rival that sooner or later will lay low her pride.”2 American statesmen
did not care what justification France used to sell her possessions. To them,
condemnation of Old World power politics did not appear inconsistent with
American territorial expansion across North America. For they considered
America’s westward thrust as America’s internal affair rather than as a matter of
foreign policy.
In this spirit, James Madison condemned war as the germ of all evils—as the
precursor of taxes and armies and all other “instruments for bringing the many
under the domination of the few.”3 His successor, James Monroe, saw no
contradiction in defending westward expansion on the ground that it was
necessary to turn America into a great power:
It must be obvious to all, that the further the expansion is carried, provided it be not beyond the just
limit, the greater will be the freedom of action to both [state and federal] Governments, and the more
perfect their security; and, in all other respects, the better the effect will be to the whole American
people. Extent of territory, whether it be great or small, gives to a nation many of its characteristics.
It marks the extent of its resources, of its population, of its physical force. It marks, in short, the
difference between a great and a small power.4
Still, while occasionally using the methods of European power politics, the
leaders of the new nation remained committed to the principles that had made
their country exceptional. The European powers fought innumerable wars to
prevent potentially dominant powers from arising. In America, the combination
of strength and distance inspired a confidence that any challenge could be
overcome after it had presented itself. European nations, with much narrower
margins of survival, formed coalitions against the possibility of change; America
was sufficiently remote to gear its policy to resisting the actuality of change.
This was the geopolitical basis of George Washington’s warning against
“permanent” alliances for any cause whatsoever. It would be unwise, he said,
to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her [European] politics, or the
ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities. Our detached and distant
situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course.5
The new nation did not treat Washington’s advice as a practical, geopolitical
judgment but as a moral maxim. As the repository of the principle of liberty,
America found it natural to interpret the security conferred on it by great oceans
as a sign of divine providence, and to attribute its actions to superior moral
insight instead of to a margin of security not shared by any other nation.
A staple of the early Republic’s foreign policy was the conviction that
Europe’s constant wars were the result of its cynical methods of statecraft.
Whereas the European leaders based their international system on the conviction
that harmony could be distilled from a competition of selfish interests, their
American colleagues envisioned a world in which states would act as
cooperative partners, not as distrustful rivals. American leaders rejected the
European idea that the morality of states should be judged by different criteria
than the morality of individuals. According to Jefferson, there existed
but one system of ethics for men and for nations—to be grateful, to be faithful to all engagements
under all circumstances, to be open and generous, promoting in the long run even the interests of
both.6
The righteousness of America’s tone—at times so grating to foreigners—
reflected the reality that America had in fact rebelled not simply against the legal
ties that had bound it to the old country but against Europe’s system and values.
America ascribed the frequency of European wars to the prevalence of
governmental institutions which denied the values of freedom and human
dignity. “As war is the system of government on the old construction,” wrote
Thomas Paine, “the animosity which nations reciprocally entertain, is nothing
more than what the policy of their governments excites, to keep up the spirit of
the system…. Man is not the enemy of man, but through the medium of a false
system of government.”7
The idea that peace depends above all on promoting democratic institutions
has remained a staple of American thought to the present day. Conventional
American wisdom has consistently maintained that democracies do not make
war against each other. Alexander Hamilton, for one, challenged the premise that
republics were essentially more peaceful than other forms of government:
Sparta, Athens, Rome, and Carthage were all republics; two of them, Athens and Carthage, of the
commercial kind. Yet were they as often engaged in wars, offensive and defensive, as the
neighboring monarchies of the same times…. In the government of Britain the representatives of the
people compose one branch of the national legislature. Commerce has been for ages the predominant
pursuit of that country. Few nations, nevertheless, have been more frequently engaged in war….8
Hamilton, however, represented a tiny minority. The overwhelming majority
of America’s leaders were as convinced then as they are now that America has a
special responsibility to spread its values as its contribution to world peace.
Then, as now, disagreements had to do with method. Should America actively
promote the spread of free institutions as a principal objective of its foreign
policy? Or should it rely on the impact of its example?
The dominant view in the early days of the Republic was that the nascent
American nation could best serve the cause of democracy by practicing its
virtues at home. In the words of Thomas Jefferson, a “just and solid republican
government” in America would be “a standing monument and example” for all
the peoples of the world.9 A year later, Jefferson returned to the theme that
America was, in effect, “acting for all mankind”:
…that circumstances denied to others, but indulged to us, have imposed on us the duty of proving
what is the degree of freedom and self-government in which a society may venture to leave its
individual members.10
The emphasis American leaders placed on the moral foundations of America’s
conduct and on its significance as a symbol of freedom led to a rejection of the
truisms of European diplomacy: that the balance of power distilled an ultimate
harmony out of the competition of selfish interests; and that security
considerations overrode the principles of civil law; in other words, that the ends
of the state justified the means.
These unprecedented ideas were being put forward by a country which was
prospering throughout the nineteenth century, its institutions in good working
order and its values vindicated. America was aware of no conflict between highminded principle and the necessities of survival. In time, the invocation of
morality as the means for solving international disputes produced a unique kind
of ambivalence and a very American type of anguish. If Americans were obliged
to invest their foreign policy with the same degree of rectitude as they did their
personal lives, how was security to be analyzed; indeed, in the extreme, did this
mean that survival was subordinate to morality? Or did America’s devotion to
free institutions confer an automatic aura of morality on even the most
seemingly self-serving acts? And if this was true, how did it differ from the
European concept of raison d’état, which asserted that a state’s actions can only
be judged by their success?
Professors Robert Tucker and David Hendrickson brilliantly analyzed this
ambivalence in American thought:
The great dilemma of Jefferson’s statecraft lay in his apparent renunciation of the means on which
states had always ultimately relied to ensure their security and to satisfy their ambitions, and his
simultaneous unwillingness to renounce the ambitions that normally led to the use of these means.
He wished, in other words, that America could have it both ways—that it could enjoy the fruits of
power without falling victim to the normal consequences of its exercise.11
To this day, the push and pull of these two approaches has been one of the major
themes of American foreign policy. By 1820, the United States found a
compromise between the two approaches which enabled it to have it both ways
until after the Second World War. It continued to castigate what went on across
the oceans as the reprehensible result of balance-of-power politics while treating
its own expansion across North America as “manifest destiny.”
Until the turn of the twentieth century, American foreign policy was basically
quite simple: to fulfill the country’s manifest destiny, and to remain free of
entanglements overseas. America favored democratic governments wherever
possible, but abjured action to vindicate its preferences. John Quincy Adams,
then Secretary of State, summed up this attitude in 1821:
Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her
[America’s] heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of
monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the
champion and vindicator only of her own.12
The reverse side of this policy of American self-restraint was the decision to
exclude European power politics from the Western Hemisphere, if necessary by
using some of the methods of European diplomacy. The Monroe Doctrine, which
proclaimed this policy, arose from the attempt of the Holy Alliance—whose
principal members were Prussia, Russia, and Austria—to suppress the revolution
in Spain in the 1820s. Opposed to intervention in domestic affairs in principle,
Great Britain was equally unwilling to countenance the Holy Alliance in the
Western Hemisphere.
British Foreign Secretary George Canning proposed joint action to the United
States in order to keep Spain’s colonies in the Americas out of the grasp of the
Holy Alliance. He wanted to make sure that, regardless of what happened in
Spain, no European power controlled Latin America. Deprived of its colonies,
Spain would not be much of a prize, Canning reasoned, and this would either
discourage intervention or make it irrelevant.
John Quincy Adams understood the British theory, but did not trust British
motives. It was too soon after the 1812 British occupation of Washington for
America to side with the erstwhile mother country. Accordingly, Adams urged
President Monroe to exclude European colonialism from the Americas as a
unilateral American decision.
The Monroe Doctrine, proclaimed in 1823, made a moat of the ocean which
separated the United States from Europe. Up to that time, the cardinal rule of
American foreign policy had been that the United States would not become
entangled in European struggles for power. The Monroe Doctrine went the next
step by declaring that Europe must not become entangled in American affairs.
And Monroe’s idea of what constituted American affairs—the whole Western
Hemisphere—was expansive indeed.
The Monroe Doctrine, moreover, did not limit itself to declarations of
principle. Daringly, it warned the European powers that the new nation would go
to war to uphold the inviolability of the Western Hemisphere. It declared that the
United States would regard any extension of European power “to any portion of
this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.”13
Finally, in language less eloquent but more explicit than that of his Secretary
of State two years earlier, President Monroe abjured any intervention in
European controversies: “In the wars of the European powers in matters relating
to themselves we have never taken any part, nor does it comport with our policy
so to do.”14
America was at one and the same time turning its back on Europe, and freeing
its hands to expand in the Western Hemisphere. Under the umbrella of the
Monroe Doctrine, America could pursue policies which were not all that
different from the dreams of any European king—expanding its commerce and
influence, annexing territory—in short, turning itself into a Great Power without
being required to practice power politics. America’s desire for expansion and its
belief that it was a more pure and principled country than any in Europe never
clashed. Since it did not regard its expansion as foreign policy, the United States
could use its power to prevail—over the Indians, over Mexico, in Texas—and to
do so in good conscience. In a nutshell, the foreign policy of the United States
was not to have a foreign policy.
Like Napoleon with respect to the Louisiana Purchase, Canning had a right to
boast that he had brought the New World into being to redress the balance of the
Old, for Great Britain indicated that it would back the Monroe Doctrine with the
Royal Navy. America, however, would redress the European balance of power
only to the extent of keeping the Holy Alliance out of the Western Hemisphere.
For the rest, the European powers would have to maintain their equilibrium
without American participation.
For the rest of the century, the principal theme of American foreign policy was
to expand the application of the Monroe Doctrine. In 1823, the Monroe Doctrine
had warned the European powers to keep out of the Western Hemisphere. By the
time of the Monroe Doctrine’s centennial, its meaning had been gradually
expanded to justify American hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. In 1845,
President Polk explained the incorporation of Texas into the United States as
necessary to prevent an independent state from becoming “an ally or dependency
of some foreign nation more powerful than herself” and hence a threat to
American security.15 In other words, the Monroe Doctrine justified American
intervention not only against an existing threat but against any possibility of an
overt challenge—much as the European balance of power did.
The Civil War briefly interrupted America’s preoccupation with territorial
expansion. Washington’s primary foreign-policy concern now was to prevent the
Confederacy from being recognized by European nations lest a multistate system
emerge on the soil of North America and with it the balance-of-power politics of
European diplomacy. But by 1868, President Andrew Johnson was back at the
old stand of justifying expansion by the Monroe Doctrine, this time in the
purchase of Alaska:
Foreign possession or control of those communities has hitherto hindered the growth and impaired
the influence of the United States. Chronic revolution and anarchy there would be equally injurious.16
Something more fundamental than expansion across the American continent was
taking place, though it went practically unnoticed by the socalled Great Powers
—a new member was joining their club as the United States became the world’s
most powerful nation. By 1885, the United States had surpassed Great Britain,
then considered the world’s major industrial power, in manufacturing output. By
the turn of the century, it was consuming more energy than Germany, France,
Austria-Hungary, Russia, Japan, and Italy combined.17 Between the Civil War
and the turn of the century, American coal production rose by 800 percent, steel
rails by 523 percent, railway track mileage by 567 percent, and wheat production
by 256 percent. Immigration contributed to the doubling of the American
population. And the process of growth was likely to accelerate.
No nation has ever experienced such an increase in its power without seeking
to translate it into global influence. America’s leaders were tempted. President
Andrew Johnson’s Secretary of State, Seward, dreamed of an empire including
Canada and much of Mexico and extending deep into the Pacific. The Grant
Administration wanted to annex the Dominican Republic and toyed with the
acquisition of Cuba. These were the kinds of initiatives which contemporary
European leaders, Disraeli or Bismarck, would have understood and approved
of.
But the American Senate remained focused on domestic priorities and
thwarted all expansionist projects. It kept the army small (25,000 men) and the
navy weak. Until 1890, the American army ranked fourteenth in the world, after
Bulgaria’s, and the American navy was smaller than Italy’s even though
America’s industrial strength was thirteen times that of Italy. America did not
participate in international conferences and was treated as a second-rank power.
In 1880, when Turkey reduced its diplomatic establishment, it eliminated its
embassies in Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United States. At the
same time, a German diplomat in Madrid offered to take a cut in salary rather
than be posted to Washington.18
But once a country has reached the level of power of post-Civil War America,
it will not forever resist the temptation of translating it into a position of
importance in the international arena. In the late 1880s, America began to build
up its navy, which, as late as 1880, was smaller than Chile’s, Brazil’s, or
Argentina’s. By 1889, Secretary of the Navy Benjamin Tracy was lobbying for a
battleship navy and the contemporary naval historian Alfred Thayer Mahan
developed a rationale for it.19
Though in fact the British Royal Navy protected America from depredations
by European powers, American leaders did not perceive Great Britain as their
country’s protector. Throughout the nineteenth century, Great Britain was
considered the greatest challenge to American interests, and the Royal Navy the
most serious strategic threat. No wonder that, when America began to flex its
muscles, it sought to expel Great Britain’s influence from the Western
Hemisphere, invoking the Monroe Doctrine which Great Britain had been so
instrumental in encouraging.
The United States was none too delicate about the challenge. In 1895,
Secretary of State Richard Olney invoked the Monroe Doctrine to warn Great
Britain with a pointed reference to the inequalities of power. “To-day,” he wrote,
“the United States is practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law
upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition.” America’s “infinite
resources combined with its isolated position render it master of the situation and
practically invulnerable as against any or all other powers.”20 America’s
renunciation of power politics clearly did not apply to the Western Hemisphere.
By 1902, Great Britain had abandoned its claim to a major role in Central
America.
Supreme in the Western Hemisphere, the United States began to enter the
wider arena of international affairs. America had grown into a world power
almost despite itself. Expanding across the continent, it had established its
preeminence all around its shores while insisting that it had no wish to conduct
the foreign policy of a Great Power. At the end of the process, America found
itself commanding the sort of power which made it a major international factor,
no matter what its preferences. America’s leaders might continue to insist that its
basic foreign policy was to serve as a “beacon” for the rest of mankind, but there
could be no denying that some of them were also becoming aware that
America’s power entitled it to be heard on the issues of the day, and that it did
not need to wait until all of mankind had become democratic to make itself a
part of the international system.
No one articulated this reasoning more trenchantly than Theodore Roosevelt.
He was the first president to insist that it was America’s duty to make its
influence felt globally, and to relate America to the world in terms of a concept
of national interest. Like his predecessors, Roosevelt was convinced of
America’s beneficent role in the world. But unlike them, Roosevelt held that
America had real foreign policy interests that went far beyond its interest in
remaining unentangled. Roosevelt started from the premise that the United
States was a power like any other, not a singular incarnation of virtue. If its
interests collided with those of other countries, America had the obligation to
draw on its strength to prevail.
As a first step, Roosevelt gave the Monroe Doctrine its most interventionist
interpretation by identifying it with imperialist doctrines of the period. In what
he called a “Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, he proclaimed on December 6,
1904, a general right of intervention by “some civilized nation” which, in the
Western Hemisphere, the United States alone had a right to exercise: “…in the
Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine
may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such
wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.”21
Roosevelt’s practice preceded his preaching. In 1902, America had forced
Haiti to clear up its debts with European banks. In 1903, it fanned unrest in
Panama into a full-scale insurrection. With American help, the local population
wrested independence from Colombia, but not before Washington had
established the Canal Zone under United States sovereignty on both sides of
what was to become the Panama Canal. In 1905, the United States established a
financial protectorate over the Dominican Republic. And in 1906, American
troops occupied Cuba.
For Roosevelt, muscular diplomacy in the Western Hemisphere was part of
America’s new global role. The two oceans were no longer wide enough to
insulate America from the rest of the world. The United States had to become an
actor on the international stage. Roosevelt said as much in a 1902 message to the
Congress: “More and more, the increasing interdependence and complexity of
international political and economic relations render it incumbent on all civilized
and orderly powers to insist on the proper policing of the world.”22
Roosevelt commands a unique historical position in America’s approach to
international relations. No other president defined America’s world role so
completely in terms of national interest, or identified the national interest so
comprehensively with the balance of power. Roosevelt shared the view of his
countrymen, that America was the best hope for the world. But unlike most of
them, he did not believe that it could preserve the peace or fulfill its destiny
simply by practicing civic virtues. In his perception of the nature of world order,
he was much closer to Palmerston or Disraeli than to Thomas Jefferson.
A great president must be an educator, bridging the gap between his people’s
future and its experience. Roosevelt taught an especially stern doctrine for a
people brought up in the belief that peace is the normal condition among nations,
that there is no difference between personal and public morality, and that
America was safely insulated from the upheavals affecting the rest of the world.
For Roosevelt rebutted each of these propositions. To him, international life
meant struggle, and Darwin’s theory of the survival of the fittest was a better
guide to history than personal morality. In Roosevelt’s view, the meek inherited
the earth only if they were strong. To Roosevelt, America was not a cause but a
great power—potentially the greatest. He hoped to be the president destined to
usher his nation onto the world scene so that it might shape the twentieth century
in the way Great Britain had dominated the nineteenth—as a country of vast
strengths which had enlisted itself, with moderation and wisdom, to work on
behalf of stability, peace, and progress.
Roosevelt was impatient with many of the pieties which dominated American
thinking on foreign policy. He disavowed the efficacy of international law. What
a nation could not protect by its own power could not be safeguarded by the
international community. He rejected disarmament, which was just then
emerging as an international topic:
As yet there is no likelihood of establishing any kind of international power… which can effectively
check wrongdoing, and in these circumstances it would be both foolish and an evil thing for a great
and free nation to deprive itself of the power to protect its own rights and even in exceptional cases to
stand up for the rights of others. Nothing would more promote iniquity… than for the free and
enlightened peoples… deliberately to render themselves powerless while leaving every despotism
and barbarism armed.23
Roosevelt was even more scathing when it came to talk about world
government:
I regard the Wilson-Bryan attitude of trusting to fantastic peace treaties, to impossible promises, to all
kinds of scraps of paper without any backing in efficient force, as abhorrent. It is infinitely better for
a nation and for the world to have the Frederick the Great and Bismarck tradition as regards foreign
policy than to have the Bryan or Bryan-Wilson attitude as a permanent national attitude…. A milkand-water righteousness unbacked by force is to the full as wicked as and even more mischievous
than force divorced from righteousness.24
In a world regulated by power, Roosevelt believed that the natural order of
things was reflected in the concept of “spheres of influence,” which assigned
preponderant influence over large regions to specific powers, for example, to the
United States in the Western Hemisphere or to Great Britain on the Indian
subcontinent. In 1908, Roosevelt acquiesced to the Japanese occupation of
Korea because, to his way of thinking, Japanese-Korean relations had to be
determined by the relative power of each country, not by the provisions of a
treaty or by international law:
Korea is absolutely Japan’s. To be sure, by treaty it was solemnly covenanted that Korea should
remain independent. But Korea was itself helpless to enforce the treaty, and it was out of the question
to suppose that any other nation… would attempt to do for the Koreans what they were utterly unable
to do for themselves.25
With Roosevelt holding such European-style views, it was not surprising that he
approached the global balance of power with a sophistication matched by no
other American president and approached only by Richard Nixon. Roosevelt at
first saw no need to engage America in the specifics of the European balance of
power because he considered it more or less self-regulating. But he left little
doubt that, if such a judgment were to prove wrong, he would urge America to
engage itself to reestablish the equilibrium. Roosevelt gradually came to see
Germany as a threat to the European balance and began to identify America’s
national interest with those of Great Britain and France.
This was demonstrated in 1906, during the Algeciras Conference, the purpose
of which was to settle the future of Morocco. Germany, which insisted on an
“open door” to forestall French domination, urged the inclusion of an American
representative, because it believed America to have significant trading interests
there. In the event, the Americans were represented in Morocco by their
ambassador to Italy, but the role he played disappointed the Germans. Roosevelt
subordinated America’s commercial interests—which in any event were not
large—to his geopolitical view. These were expressed by Henry Cabot Lodge in
a letter to Roosevelt at the height of the Moroccan crisis. “France,” he said,
“ought to be with us and England—in our zone and our combination. It is the
sound arrangement economically and politically.”26
Whereas in Europe, Roosevelt considered Germany the principal threat, in
Asia he was concerned with Russian aspirations and thus favored Japan, Russia’s
principal rival. “There is no nation in the world which, more than Russia, holds
in its hands the fate of the coming years,” Roosevelt declared.27 In 1904, Japan,
protected by an alliance with Great Britain, attacked Russia. Though Roosevelt
proclaimed American neutrality, he leaned toward Japan. A Russian victory, he
argued, would be “a blow to civilization.”28 And when Japan destroyed the
Russian fleet, he rejoiced: “I was thoroughly pleased with the Japanese victory,
for Japan is playing our game.”29
He wanted Russia to be weakened rather than altogether eliminated from the
balance of power—for, according to the maxims of balance-of-power diplomacy,
an excessive weakening of Russia would have merely substituted a Japanese for
the Russian threat. Roosevelt perceived that the outcome which served America
best would be one in which Russia “should be left face to face with Japan so that
each may have a moderative action on the other.”30
On the basis of geopolitical realism rather than high-minded altruism,
Roosevelt invited the two belligerents to send representatives to his Oyster Bay
home to work out a peace treaty, which was ultimately concluded at Portsmouth,
New Hampshire, that limited the Japanese victory and preserved equilibrium in
the Far East. As a result, Roosevelt became the first American to be awarded the
Nobel Peace Prize, for producing a settlement based on maxims like balance of
power and spheres of influence which, after his successor, Wilson, would appear
quite un-American.
In 1914, Roosevelt initially took a relatively clinical view of Germany’s
invasion of Belgium and Luxembourg, though it was in flagrant violation of
treaties which had established the neutrality of these two countries:
I am not taking sides one way or the other as concerns the violation or disregard of these treaties.
When giants are engaged in a death wrestle, as they reel to and fro they are certain to trample on
whoever gets in the way of either of the huge, straining combatants, unless it is dangerous to do so.31
A few months after the outbreak of war in Europe, Roosevelt reversed his initial
judgment about the violation of Belgian neutrality, though, characteristically, it
was not the illegality of the German invasion that concerned him but the threat it
posed to the balance of power: “…do you not believe that if Germany won in
this war, smashed the English Fleet and destroyed the British Empire, within a
year or two she would insist upon taking the dominant position in South and
Central America…?”32
He urged massive rearmament so that America might throw its weight behind
the Triple Entente. He regarded a German victory as both possible and
dangerous for the United States. A victory for the Central Powers would have
forfeited the protection of the British Royal Navy, permitting German
imperialism to assert itself in the Western Hemisphere.
That Roosevelt should have considered British naval control of the Atlantic
safer than German hegemony was due to such intangible non-power factors as
cultural affinity and historical experience. Indeed, there were strong cultural ties
between England and America for which there was no counterpart in U.S.German relations. Moreover, the United States was used to Great Britain ruling
the seas and was comfortable with the idea, and no longer suspected Great
Britain of expansionist designs in the Americas. Germany, however, was
regarded with apprehension. On October 3, 1914, Roosevelt wrote to the British
ambassador to Washington (conveniently forgetting his earlier judgment about
the inevitability of Germany’s disregard of Belgian neutrality) that:
If I had been President, I should have acted [against Germany] on the thirtieth or thirty-first of July.33
In a letter to Rudyard Kipling a month later, Roosevelt admitted to the difficulty
of bringing American power to bear on the European war on the basis of his
convictions. The American people were unwilling to follow a course of action
cast so strictly in terms of power politics:
If I should advocate all that I myself believe, I would do no good among our people, because they
would not follow me. Our people are shortsighted, and they do not understand international matters.
Your people have been shortsighted, but they are not as shortsighted as ours in these matters….
Thanks to the width of the ocean, our people believe that they have nothing to fear from the present
contest, and that they have no responsibility concerning it.34
Had American thinking on foreign policy culminated in Theodore Roosevelt, it
would have been described as an evolution adapting traditional principles of
European statecraft to the American condition. Roosevelt would have been seen
as the president who was in office when the United States, having established a
dominant position in the Americas, began to make its weight felt as a world
power. But American foreign-policy thinking did not end with Roosevelt, nor
could it have done so. A leader who confines his role to his people’s experience
dooms himself to stagnation; a leader who outstrips his people’s experience runs
the risk of not being understood. Neither its experience nor its values prepared
America for the role assigned to it by Roosevelt.
In one of history’s ironies, America did in the end fulfill the leading role
Roosevelt had envisioned for it, and within Roosevelt’s lifetime, but it did so on
behalf of principles Roosevelt derided, and under the guidance of a president
whom Roosevelt despised. Woodrow Wilson was the embodiment of the
tradition of American exceptionalism, and originated what would become the
dominant intellectual school of American foreign policy—a school whose
precepts Roosevelt considered at best irrelevant and at worst inimical to
America’s long-range interests.
In terms of all established principles of statecraft, Roosevelt had by far the
better of the argument between these two of America’s greatest presidents.
Nevertheless, it was Wilson who prevailed: a century later, Roosevelt is
remembered for his achievements, but it was Wilson who shaped American
thought. Roosevelt understood how international politics worked among the
nations then conducting world affairs—no American president has had a more
acute insight into the operation of international systems. Yet Wilson grasped the
mainsprings of American motivation, perhaps the principal one being that
America simply did not see itself as a nation like any other. It lacked both the
theoretical and the practical basis for the European-style diplomacy of constant
adjustment of the nuances of power from a posture of moral neutrality for the
sole purpose of preserving an ever-shifting balance. Whatever the realities and
the lessons of power, the American people’s abiding conviction has been that its
exceptional character resides in the practice and propagation of freedom.
Americans could be moved to great deeds only through a vision that coincided
with their perception of their country as exceptional. However intellectually
attuned to the way the diplomacy of the Great Powers actually operated,
Roosevelt’s approach failed to persuade his countrymen that they needed to enter
the First World War. Wilson, on the other hand, tapped his people’s emotions
with arguments that were as morally elevated as they were largely
incomprehensible to foreign leaders.
Wilson’s was an astonishing achievement. Rejecting power politics, he knew
how to move the American people. An academic who arrived in politics
relatively late, he was elected due to a split in the Republican Party between Taft
and Roosevelt. Wilson grasped that America’s instinctive isolationism could be
overcome only by an appeal to its belief in the exceptional nature of its ideals.
Step by step, he took an isolationist country into war, after he had first
demonstrated his Administration’s devotion to peace by a passionate advocacy
of neutrality. And he did so while abjuring any selfish national interests, and by
affirming that America sought no other benefit than vindication of its principles.
In Wilson’s first State of the Union Address, on December 2, 1913, he laid
down the outline of what later came to be known as Wilsonianism. Universal law
and not equilibrium, national trustworthiness and not national self-assertion
were, in Wilson’s view, the foundations of international order. Recommending
the ratification of several treaties of arbitration, Wilson argued that binding
arbitration, not force, should become the method for resolving international
disputes:
There is only one possible standard by which to determine controversies between the United States
and other nations, and that is compounded of these two elements: Our own honor and our obligations
to the peace of the world. A test so compounded ought easily to be made to govern both the
establishment of new treaty obligations and the interpretation of those already assumed.35
Nothing annoyed Roosevelt as much as high-sounding principles backed by
neither the power nor the will to implement them. He wrote to a friend: “If I
must choose between a policy of blood and iron and one of milk and water…
why I am for the policy of blood and iron. It is better not only for the nation but
in the long run for the world.”36
By the same token, Roosevelt’s proposal to respond to the war in Europe by
increasing defense spending made no sense to Wilson. In his second State of the
Union address on December 8, 1914, and after the European war had been
raging for four months, Wilson rejected an increase in America’s armaments,
because this would signal that “we had lost our self-possession” as the result of a
war “whose causes cannot touch us, whose very existence affords us
opportunities for friendship and disinterested service….”37
America’s influence, in Wilson’s view, depended on its unselfishness; it had to
preserve itself so that, in the end, it could step forward as a credible arbiter
between the warring parties. Roosevelt had asserted that the war in Europe, and
especially a German victory, would ultimately threaten American security.
Wilson maintained that America was essentially disinterested, hence should
emerge as mediator. Because of America’s faith in values higher than the balance
of power, the war in Europe now afforded it an extraordinary opportunity to
proselytize for a new and better approach to international affairs.
Roosevelt ridiculed such ideas and accused Wilson of pandering to isolationist
sentiments to help his re-election in 1916. In fact, the thrust of Wilson’s policy
was quite the opposite of isolationism. What Wilson was proclaiming was not
America’s withdrawal from the world but the universal applicability of its values
and, in time, America’s commitment to spreading them. Wilson restated what
had become the conventional American wisdom since Jefferson, but put it in the
service of a crusading ideology: • America’s special mission transcends day-today diplomacy and obliges it to serve as a beacon of liberty for the rest of
mankind.
• The foreign policies of democracies are morally superior because the people
are inherently peace-loving.
• Foreign policy should reflect the same moral standards as personal ethics.
• The state has no right to claim a separate morality for itself.
Wilson endowed these assertions of American moral exceptionalism with a
universal dimension:
Dread of the power of any other nation we are incapable of. We are not jealous of rivalry in the fields
of commerce or of any other peaceful achievement. We mean to live our own lives as we will; but we
mean also to let live. We are, indeed, a true friend to all the nations of the world, because we threaten
none, covet the possessions of none, desire the overthrow of none.38
No other nation has ever rested its claim to international leadership on its
altruism. All other nations have sought to be judged by the compatibility of their
national interests with those of other societies. Yet, from Woodrow Wilson
through George Bush, American presidents have invoked their country’s
unselfishness as the crucial attribute of its leadership role. Neither Wilson nor his
later disciples, through the present, have been willing to face the fact that, to
foreign leaders imbued with less elevated maxims, America’s claim to altruism
evokes a certain aura of unpredictability; whereas the national interest can be
calculated, altruism depends on the definition of its practitioner.
To Wilson, however, the altruistic nature of American society was proof of
divine favor:
It was as if in the Providence of God a continent had been kept unused and waiting for a peaceful
people who loved liberty and the rights of men more than they loved anything else, to come and set
up an unselfish commonwealth.39
The claim that American goals represented providential dispensation implied a
global role for America that would prove far more sweeping than any Roosevelt
had ever imagined. For he had wanted no more than to improve the balance of
power and to invest America’s role in it with the importance commensurate with
its growing strength. In Roosevelt’s conception, America would have been one
nation among many—more powerful than most and part of an elite group of
great powers—but still subject to the historic ground rules of equilibrium.
Wilson moved America onto a plane entirely remote from such
considerations. Disdaining the balance of power, he insisted that America’s role
was “not to prove… our selfishness, but our greatness.”40 If that was true,
America had no right to hoard its values for itself. As early as 1915, Wilson put
forward the unprecedented doctrine that the security of America was inseparable
from the security of all the rest of mankind. This implied that it was henceforth
America’s duty to oppose aggression everywhere:
…because we demand unmolested development and the undisturbed government of our own lives
upon our own principles of right and liberty, we resent, from whatever quarter it may come, the
aggression we ourselves will not practice. We insist upon security in prosecuting our self-chosen
lines of national development. We do more than that. We demand it also for others. We do not
confine our enthusiasm for individual liberty and free national development to the incidents and
movements of affairs which affect only ourselves. We feel it wherever there is a people that tries to
walk in these difficult paths of independence and right.41
Envisioning America as a beneficent global policeman, this foreshadowed the
containment policy, which would be developed after the Second World War.
Even at his most exuberant, Roosevelt would never have dreamt of so
sweeping a sentiment portending global interventionism. But, then, he was the
warrior-statesman; Wilson was the prophet-priest. Statesmen, even warriors,
focus on the world in which they live; to prophets, the “real” world is the one
they want to bring into being.
Wilson transformed what had started out as a reaffirmation of American
neutrality into a set of propositions laying the foundations for a global crusade.
In Wilson’s view, there was no essential difference between freedom for
America and freedom for the world. Proving that the time spent in faculty
meetings, where hairsplitting exegesis reigns supreme, had not been wasted, he
developed an extraordinary interpretation of what George Washington had really
meant when he warned against foreign entanglements. Wilson redefined
“foreign” in a way that would surely have astonished the first president. What
Washington meant, according to Wilson, was that America must avoid becoming
entangled in the purposes of others. But, Wilson argued, nothing that concerns
humanity “can be foreign or indifferent to us.”42 Hence America had an
unlimited charter to involve itself abroad.
What extraordinary conceit to derive a charter for global intervention from a
Founding Father’s injunction against foreign entanglements, and to elaborate a
philosophy of neutrality that made involvement in war inevitable! As Wilson
edged his country ever closer to the world war by articulating his visions of a
better world, he evoked a vitality and an idealism that seemed to justify
America’s hibernation for a century just so it could now enter the international
arena with a dynamism and an innocence unknown to its more seasoned
partners. European diplomacy had been hardened, and humbled, in the crucible
of history; its statesmen saw events through the prism of many dreams proved
fragile, of high hopes dashed and ideals lost to the fragility of human foresight.
America knew no such limitations, boldly proclaiming, if not the end of history,
then surely its irrelevance, as it moved to transform values heretofore considered
unique to America into universal principles applicable to all. Wilson was thus
able to overcome, at least for a time, the tension in American thinking between
America the secure and America the unsullied. America could only approach
entry into World War I as an engagement on behalf of peoples everywhere, not
just itself, and in the role of the crusader for universal liberties.
Germany’s sinking of the Lusitania and above all its renewal of unrestricted
submarine warfare became the proximate cause of America’s declaration of war.
But Wilson did not justify America’s entry into the war on the grounds of
specific grievances. National interests were irrelevant; Belgium’s violation and
the balance of power had nothing to do with it. Rather, the war had a moral
foundation, whose primary objective was a new and more just international
order. “It is a fearful thing,” Wilson reflected in the speech asking for a
declaration of war,
to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars,
civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But right is more precious than peace, and we shall
fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts, for democracy, for the right of
those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of
small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace
and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.43
In a war on behalf of such principles, there could be no compromise. Total
victory was the only valid goal. Roosevelt would almost certainly have
expressed America’s war aims in political and strategic terms; Wilson, flaunting
American disinterest, defined America’s war aims in entirely moral categories.
In Wilson’s view, the war was not the consequence of clashing national interests
pursued without restraint, but of Germany’s unprovoked assault on the
international order. More specifically, the true culprit was not the German nation,
but the German Emperor himself. In urging a declaration of war, Wilson argued:
We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no feeling towards them but one of sympathy
and friendship. It was not upon their impulse that their government acted in entering this war. It was
not with their previous knowledge or approval. It was a war determined upon as wars used to be
determined upon in the old, unhappy days when peoples were nowhere consulted by their rulers and
wars were provoked and waged in the interest of dynasties.44
Though William II had long been regarded as a loose cannon on the European
stage, no European statesman had ever advocated deposing him; nobody had
viewed the overthrow of the Emperor or of his dynasty as the key to peace in
Europe. But once the issue of Germany’s domestic structure had been advanced,
the war could no longer end in the sort of compromise balancing conflicting
interests that Roosevelt had achieved between Japan and Russia ten years earlier.
On January 22, 1917, before America had entered the war, Wilson proclaimed its
goal to be “peace without victory.”45 What Wilson proposed, however, when
America did enter the war was a peace achievable only by total victory.
Wilson’s pronouncements soon became conventional wisdom. Even as
experienced a figure as Herbert Hoover began to describe the German ruling
class as inherently wicked, preying “upon the life blood of other peoples.”46 The
mood of the times was aptly expressed by Jacob Schurman, President of Cornell
University, who saw the war as a struggle between the “Kingdom of Heaven”
and the “Kingdom of Hun-land, which is force and frightfulness.”47
Yet the overthrow of a single dynasty could not possibly bring about all that
Wilson’s rhetoric implied. In urging a declaration of war, Wilson extended his
moral reach to the entire world; not only Germany but all other nations had to be
made safe for democracy; for peace would require “a partnership of democratic
nations.”48 In another speech, Wilson went even further by saying that America’s
power would atrophy unless the United States spread freedom around the globe:
We set this Nation up to make men free, and we did not confine our conception and purpose to
America, and now we will make men free. If we did not do that, all the fame of America would be
gone, and all her power would be dissipated.49
The closest Wilson ever came to stating his war aims in detail was in the
Fourteen Points, which will be dealt with in chapter 9. Wilson’s historic
achievement lies in his recognition that Americans cannot sustain major
international engagements that are not justified by their moral faith. His downfall
was in treating the tragedies of history as aberrations, or as due to the
shortsightedness and the evil of individual leaders, and in his rejection of any
objective basis for peace other than the force of public opinion and the
worldwide spread of democratic institutions. In the process, he would ask the
nations of Europe to undertake something for which they were neither
philosophically nor historically prepared, and right after a war which had drained
them of substance.
For 300 years, the European nations had based their world order on a
balancing of national interests, and their foreign policies on a quest for security,
treating every additional benefit as a bonus. Wilson asked the nations of Europe
to base their foreign policy on moral convictions, leaving security to result
incidentally, if at all. But Europe had no conceptual apparatus for such a
disinterested policy, and it still remained to be seen whether America, having
just emerged from a century of isolation, could sustain the permanent
involvement in international affairs that Wilson’s theories implied.
Wilson’s appearance on the scene was a watershed for America, one of those
rare examples of a leader who fundamentally alters the course of his country’s
history. Had Roosevelt or his ideas prevailed in 1912, the question of war aims
would have been based on an inquiry into the nature of American national
interest. Roosevelt would have rested America’s entry into the war on the
proposition—which he in fact advanced—that, unless America joined the Triple
Entente, the Central Powers would win the war and, sooner or later, pose a threat
to American security.
The American national interest, so defined, would, over time, have led
America to adopt a global policy comparable to Great Britain’s toward
Continental Europe. For three centuries, British leaders had operated from the
assumption that, if Europe’s resources were marshaled by a single dominant
power, that country would then have the resources to challenge Great Britain’s
command of the seas, and thus threaten its independence. Geopolitically, the
United States, also an island off the shores of Eurasia, should, by the same
reasoning, have felt obliged to resist the domination of Europe or Asia by any
one power and, even more, the control of both continents by the same power. In
these terms, it should have been the extent of Germany’s geopolitical reach and
not its moral transgressions that provided the principal casus belli.
However, such an Old World approach ran counter to the wellspring of
American emotions being tapped by Wilson—as it does to this day. Not even
Roosevelt could have managed the power politics he advocated, though he died
convinced that he could have. At any rate, Roosevelt was no longer the
president, and Wilson had made it clear, even before America entered the war,
that he would resist any attempt to base the postwar order on established
principles of international politics.
Wilson saw the causes of the war not only in the wickedness of the German
leadership but in the European balance-of-power system as well. On January 22,
1917, he attacked the international order which had preceded the war as a system
of “organized rivalries”:
The question upon which the whole future peace and policy of the world depends is this: Is the
present war a struggle for a just and secure peace, or only for a new balance of power?… There must
be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized
common peace.50
What Wilson meant by “community of power” was an entirely new concept that
later became known as “collective security” (though William Gladstone in Great
Britain had put forward a stillborn variation of it in the course of 1880).51
Convinced that all the nations of the world had an equal interest in peace and
would therefore unite to punish those who disturbed it, Wilson proposed to
defend the international order by the moral consensus of the peace-loving:
…this age is an age… which rejects the standards of national selfishness that once governed the
counsels of nations and demands that they shall give way to a new order of things in which the only
questions will be: “Is it right?” “Is it just?” “Is it in the interest of mankind?”52
To institutionalize this consensus, Wilson put forward the League of Nations, a
quintessentially American institution. Under the auspices of this world
organization, power would yield to morality and the force of arms to the dictates
of public opinion. Wilson kept emphasizing that, had the public been adequately
informed, the war would never have occurred—ignoring the passionate
demonstrations of joy and relief which had greeted the onset of war in all
capitals, including those of democratic Great Britain and France. If the new
theory was to work, in Wilson’s view, at least two changes in international
governance had to take place: first, the spread of democratic governments
throughout the world, and, next, the elaboration of a “new and more wholesome
diplomacy” based on “the same high code of honor that we demand of
individuals.”53
In 1918, Wilson stated as a requirement of peace the hitherto unheard-of and
breathtakingly ambitious goal of “the destruction of every arbitrary power
anywhere that can separately, secretly and of its single choice disturb the peace
of the world; or, if it cannot be presently destroyed, at the least its reduction to
virtual impotence.”54 A League of Nations so composed and animated by such
attitudes would resolve crises without war, Wilson told the Peace Conference on
February 14, 1919:
…throughout this instrument [the League Covenant] we are depending primarily and chiefly upon
one great force, and that is the moral force of the public opinion of the world—the cleansing and
clarifying and compelling influences of publicity… so that those things that are destroyed by the light
may be properly destroyed by the overwhelming light of the universal expression of the
condemnation of the world.55
The preservation of peace would no longer spring from the traditional calculus
of power but from worldwide consensus backed up by a policing mechanism. A
universal grouping of largely democratic nations would act as the “trustee of
peace,” and replace the old balance-of-power and alliance systems.
Such exalted sentiments had never before been put forward by any nation, let
alone been implemented. Nevertheless, in the hands of American idealism they
were turned into the common currency of national thinking on foreign policy.
Every American president since Wilson has advanced variations of Wilson’s
theme. Domestic debates have more often dealt with the failure to fulfill
Wilson’s ideals (soon so commonplace that they were no longer even identified
with him) than with whether they were in fact lending adequate guidance in
meeting the occasionally brutal challenges of a turbulent world. For three
generations, critics have savaged Wilson’s analysis and conclusions; and yet, in
all this time, Wilson’s principles have remained the bedrock of American
foreign-policy thinking.
And yet Wilson’s intermingling of power and principle also set the stage for
decades of ambivalence as the American conscience tried to reconcile its
principles with its necessities. The basic premise of collective security was that
all nations would view every threat to security in the same way and be prepared
to run the same risks in resisting it. Not only had nothing like it ever actually
occurred, nothing like it was destined to occur in the entire history of both the
League of Nations and the United Nations. Only when a threat is truly
overwhelming and genuinely affects all, or most, societies is such a consensus
possible—as it was during the two world wars and, on a regional basis, in the
Cold War. But in the vast majority of cases—and in nearly all of the difficult
ones—the nations of the world tend to disagree either about the nature of the
threat or about the type of sacrifice they are prepared to make to meet it. This
was the case from Italy’s aggressions against Abyssinia in 1935 to the Bosnian
crisis in 1992. And when it has been a matter of achieving positive objectives or
remedying perceived injustices, global consensus has proved even more difficult
to achieve. Ironically, in the post–Cold War world, which has no overwhelming
ideological or military threat and which pays more lip service to democracy than
has any previous era, these difficulties have only increased.
Wilsonianism also accentuated another latent split in American thought on
international affairs. Did America have any security interests it needed to defend
regardless of the methods by which they were challenged? Or should America
resist only changes which could fairly be described as illegal? Was it the fact or
the method of international transformation that concerned America? Did
America reject the principles of geopolitics altogether? Or did they need to be
reinterpreted through the filter of American values? And if these should clash,
which would prevail?
The implication of Wilsonianism has been that America resisted, above all,
the method of change, and that it had no strategic interests worth defending if
they were threatened by apparently legal methods. As late as the Gulf War,
President Bush insisted that he was not so much defending vital oil supplies as
resisting the principle of aggression. And during the Cold War, some of the
domestic American debate concerned the question whether America, with all its
failings, had a moral right to organize resistance to the Moscow threat.
Theodore Roosevelt would have had no doubt as to the answer to these
questions. To assume that nations would perceive threats identically or be
prepared to react to them uniformly represented a denial of everything he had
ever stood for. Nor could he envision any world organization to which victim
and aggressor could comfortably belong at the same time. In November 1918, he
wrote in a letter:
I am for such a League provided we don’t expect too much from it…. I am not willing to play the
part which even Aesop held up to derision when he wrote of how the wolves and the sheep agreed to
disarm, and how the sheep as a guarantee of good faith sent away the watchdogs, and were then
forthwith eaten by the wolves.56
The following month, he wrote this to Senator Knox of Pennsylvania:
The League of Nations may do a little good, but the more pompous it is and the more it pretends to
do, the less it will really accomplish. The talk about it has a grimly humorous suggestion of the talk
about the Holy Alliance a hundred years ago, which had as its main purpose the perpetual
maintenance of peace. The Czar Alexander by the way, was the President Wilson of this particular
movement a century ago.57
In Roosevelt’s estimation, only mystics, dreamers, and intellectuals held the
view that peace was man’s natural condition and that it could be maintained by
disinterested consensus. To him, peace was inherently fragile and could be
preserved only by eternal vigilance, by the arms of the strong, and by alliances
among the like-minded.
But Roosevelt lived either a century too late or a century too early. His
approach to international affairs died with him in 1919; no significant school of
American thought on foreign policy has invoked him since. On the other hand, it
is surely the measure of Wilson’s intellectual triumph that even Richard Nixon,
whose foreign policy in fact embodied many of Roosevelt’s precepts, considered
himself above all a disciple of Wilson’s internationalism, and hung a portrait of
the wartime president in the Cabinet Room.
The League of Nations failed to take hold in America because the country was
not yet ready for so global a role. Nevertheless, Wilson’s intellectual victory
proved more seminal than any political triumph could have been. For, whenever
America has faced the task of constructing a new world order, it has returned in
one way or another to Woodrow Wilson’s precepts. At the end of World War II,
it helped build the United Nations on the same principles as those of the League,
hoping to found peace on a concord of the victors. When this hope died,
America waged the Cold War not as a conflict between two superpowers but as a
moral struggle for democracy. When communism collapsed, the Wilsonian idea
that the road to peace lay in collective security, coupled with the worldwide
spread of democratic institutions, was adopted by administrations of both major
American political parties.
In Wilsonianism was incarnate the central drama of America on the world
stage: America’s ideology has, in a sense, been revolutionary while,
domestically, Americans have considered themselves satisfied with the status
quo. Tending to turn foreign-policy issues into a struggle between good and evil,
Americans have generally felt ill at ease with compromise, as they have with
partial or inconclusive outcomes. The fact that America has shied away from
seeking vast geopolitical transformations has often associated it with defense of
the territorial, and sometimes the political, status quo. Trusting in the rule of law,
it has found it difficult to reconcile its faith in peaceful change with the historical
fact that almost all significant changes in history have involved violence and
upheaval.
America found that it would have to implement its ideals in a world less
blessed than its own and in concert with states possessed of narrower margins of
survival, more limited objectives, and far less self-confidence. And yet America
has persevered. The postwar world became largely America’s creation, so that,
in the end, it did come to play the role Wilson had envisioned for it—as a beacon
to follow, and a hope to attain.
CHAPTER THREE
From Universality to Equilibrium: Richelieu,
William of Orange, and Pitt
What historians describe today as the European balance-of-power system
emerged in the seventeenth century from the final collapse of the medieval
aspiration to universality—a concept of world order that represented a blending
of the traditions of the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church. The world was
conceived as mirroring the Heavens. Just as one God ruled in Heaven, so one
emperor would rule over the secular world, and one pope over the Universal
Church.
In this spirit, the feudal states of Germany and Northern Italy were grouped
under the rule of the Holy Roman Emperor. Into the seventeenth century, this
empire had the potential to dominate Europe. France, whose frontier was far
west of the Rhine River, and England were peripheral states with respect to it.
Had the Holy Roman Emperor ever succeeded in establishing central control
over all the territories technically under his jurisdiction, the relations of the
Western European states to it might have been similar to those of China’s
neighbors to the Middle Kingdom, with France comparable to Vietnam or Korea,
and England to Japan.
For most of the medieval period, however, the Holy Roman Emperor never
achieved that degree of central control. One reason was the lack of adequate
transportation and communication systems, making it difficult to tie together
such extensive territories. But the most important reason was that the Holy
Roman Empire had separated control of the church from control of the
government. Unlike a pharaoh or a caesar, the Holy Roman Emperor was not
deemed to possess divine attributes. Everywhere outside Western Europe, even
in the regions governed by the Eastern Church, religion and government were
unified in the sense that key appointments to each were subject to the central
government; religious authorities had neither the means nor the authority to
assert the autonomous position demanded by Western Christianity as a matter of
right.
In Western Europe, the potential and, from time to time, actual conflict
between pope and emperor established the conditions for eventual
constitutionalism and the separation of powers which are the basis of modern
democracy. It enabled the various feudal rulers to enhance their autonomy by
exacting a price from both contending factions. This, in turn, led to a
fractionated Europe—a patchwork of duchies, counties, cities, and bishoprics.
Though in theory all the feudal lords owed fealty to the emperor, in practice they
did what they pleased. Various dynasties claimed the imperial crown, and central
authority almost disappeared. The emperors maintained the old vision of
universal rule without any possibility of realizing it. At the fringes of Europe,
France, England, and Spain did not accept the authority of the Holy Roman
Empire, though they remained part of the Universal Church.
Not until the Habsburg dynasty had laid near-permanent claim to the imperial
crown in the fifteenth century and, through prudent marriages, acquired the
Spanish crown and its vast resources, did it become possible for the Holy Roman
Emperor to aspire to translate his universal claims into a political system. In the
first half of the sixteenth century, Emperor Charles V revived the imperial
authority to a point which raised the prospect of a Central European empire,
composed of what is today Germany, Austria, Northern Italy, the Czech
Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Eastern France, Belgium, and the Netherlands—a
grouping so potentially dominant as to prevent the emergence of anything
resembling the European balance of power.
At that very moment, the weakening of the Papacy under the impact of the
Reformation thwarted the prospect of a hegemonic European empire. When
strong, the Papacy had been a thorn in the side of the Holy Roman Emperor and
a formidable rival. When on the decline in the sixteenth century, the Papacy
proved equally a bane to the idea of empire. Emperors wanted to see themselves,
and wanted others to see them, as the agents of God. But in the sixteenth century,
the emperor came to be perceived in Protestant lands less as an agent of God
than as a Viennese warlord tied to a decadent pope. The Reformation gave
rebellious princes a new freedom of action, in both the religious and the political
realms. Their break with Rome was a break with religious universality; their
struggle with the Habsburg emperor demonstrated that the princes no longer saw
fealty to the empire as a religious duty.
With the concept of unity collapsing, the emerging states of Europe needed
some principle to justify their heresy and to regulate their relations. They found
it in the concepts of raison d’état and the balance of power. Each depended on
the other. Raison d’état asserted that the well-being of the state justified
whatever means were employed to further it; the national interest supplanted the
medieval notion of a universal morality. The balance of power replaced the
nostalgia for universal monarchy with the consolation that each state, in pursuing
its own selfish interests, would somehow contribute to the safety and progress of
all the others.
The earliest and most comprehensive formulation of this new approach came
from France, which was also one of the first nation-states in Europe. France was
the country that stood to lose the most by the reinvigoration of the Holy Roman
Empire, because it might well—to use modern terminology—have been
“Finlandized” by it. As religious restraints weakened, France began to exploit
the rivalries that the Reformation had generated among its neighbors. French
rulers recognized that the progressive weakening of the Holy Roman Empire
(and even more its disintegration) would enhance France’s security and, with
good fortune, enable it to expand eastward.
The principal agent for this French policy was an improbable figure, a prince
of the Church, Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal de Richelieu, First Minister of
France from 1624 to 1642. Upon learning of Cardinal Richelieu’s death, Pope
Urban VIII is alleged to have said, “If there is a God, the Cardinal de Richelieu
will have much to answer for. If not… well, he had a successful life.”1 This
ambivalent epitaph would no doubt have pleased the statesman, who achieved
vast successes by ignoring, and indeed transcending, the essential pieties of his
age.
Few statesmen can claim a greater impact on history. Richelieu was the father
of the modern state system. He promulgated the concept of raison d’état and
practiced it relentlessly for the benefit of his own country. Under his auspices,
raison d’état replaced the medieval concept of universal moral values as the
operating principle of French policy. Initially, he sought to prevent Habsburg
domination of Europe, but ultimately left a legacy that for the next two centuries
tempted his successors to establish French primacy in Europe. Out of the failure
of these ambitions, a balance of power emerged, first as a fact of life, then as a
system for organizing international relations.
Richelieu came into office in 1624, when the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor
Ferdinand II was attempting to revive Catholic universality, stamp out
Protestantism, and establish imperial control over the princes of Central Europe.
This process, the Counter-Reformation, led to what was later called the Thirty
Years’ War, which erupted in Central Europe in 1618 and turned into one of the
most brutal and destructive wars in the history of mankind.
By 1618, the German-speaking territory of Central Europe, most of which was
part of the Holy Roman Empire, was divided into two armed camps—the
Protestants and the Catholics. The fuse that set off the war was lit that same year
in Prague, and before long all of Germany was drawn into the conflict. As
Germany was progressively bled white, its principalities became easy prey for
outside invaders. Soon Danish and Swedish armies were cutting their way
through Central Europe, and eventually the French army joined the fray. By the
time the war ended in 1648, Central Europe had been devastated and Germany
had lost almost a third of its population. In the crucible of this tragic conflict,
Cardinal Richelieu grafted the principle of raison d’état onto French foreign
policy, a principle that the other European states adopted in the century that
followed.
As a prince of the Church, Richelieu ought to have welcomed Ferdinand’s
drive to restore Catholic orthodoxy. But Richelieu put the French national
interest above any religious goals. His vocation as cardinal did not keep
Richelieu from seeing the Habsburg attempt to reestablish the Catholic religion
as a geopolitical threat to France’s security. To him, it was not a religious act but
a political maneuver by Austria to achieve dominance in Central Europe and
thereby to reduce France to second-class status.
Richelieu’s fear was not without foundation. A glance at the map of Europe
shows that France was surrounded by Habsburg lands on all sides: Spain to the
south; the Northern Italian city-states, dominated mostly by Spain, in the
southeast; Franche-Comté (today the region above Lyon and Savoy), also under
Spanish control, in the east, and the Spanish Netherlands in the north. The few
frontiers not under the rule of the Spanish Habsburgs were subject to the
Austrian branch of the family. The Duchy of Lorraine owed fealty to the
Austrian Holy Roman Emperor, as did strategically important areas along the
Rhine in what is present-day Alsace. If Northern Germany were also to fall
under Habsburg rule, France would become perilously weak in relation to the
Holy Roman Empire.
Richelieu derived little comfort from the fact that Spain and Austria shared
France’s Catholic faith. Quite to the contrary, a victory for the CounterReformation was exactly what Richelieu was determined to prevent. In pursuit
of what would today be called a national security interest and was then labeled—
for the first time—raison d’état, Richelieu was prepared to side with the
Protestant princes and exploit the schism within the Universal Church.
Had the Habsburg emperors played according to the same rules or understood
the emerging world of raison d’état, they would have seen how well placed they
were to achieve what Richelieu feared most—the preeminence of Austria and
the emergence of the Holy Roman Empire as the dominant power on the
Continent. Through the centuries, however, the enemies of the Habsburgs
benefited from the dynasty’s rigidity in adjusting to tactical necessities or
understanding future trends. The Habsburg rulers were men of principle. They
never compromised their convictions except in defeat. At the start of this
political odyssey, therefore, they were quite defenseless against the ruthless
Cardinal’s machinations.
Emperor Ferdinand II, Richelieu’s foil, had almost certainly never heard of
raison d’état. Even if he had, he would have rejected it as blasphemy, for he saw
his secular mission as carrying out the will of God, and always stressed the
“holy” in his title as Holy Roman Emperor. Never would he have conceded that
divine ends could be achieved by less than moral means. Never would he have
thought of concluding treaties with the Protestant Swedes or the Muslim Turks,
measures which the Cardinal pursued as a matter of course. Ferdinand’s adviser,
the Jesuit Lamormaini, thus summarized the Emperor’s outlook:
The false and corrupt policies, which are widespread in these times, he, in his wisdom, condemned
from the start. He held that those who followed such policies could not be dealt with, since they
practice falsehood and misuse God and religion. It would be a great folly for one to try to strengthen
a kingdom, which God alone has granted, with means that God hates.2
A ruler committed to such absolute values found it impossible to compromise,
let alone to manipulate, his bargaining position. In 1596, while still an archduke,
Ferdinand declared, “I would rather die than grant any concessions to the
sectarians when it comes to religion.”3 To the detriment of his empire, he
certainly lived up to his words. Since he was less concerned with the Empire’s
welfare than with obeisance to the will of God, he considered himself dutybound to crush Protestantism even though some accommodation with it clearly
would have been in his best interests. In modern terms, he was a fanatic. The
words of one of the imperial advisers, Caspar Scioppius, highlight the Emperor’s
beliefs: “Woe to the king who ignores the voice of God beseeching him to kill
the heretics. You should not wage war for yourself, but for God” (Bellum non
tuum, sed Dei esse statuas).4 For Ferdinand, the state existed in order to serve
religion, not vice versa: “In matters of state, which are so important for our holy
confession, one cannot always take into account human considerations; rather, he
must hope… in God… and trust only in Him.”5
Richelieu treated Ferdinand’s faith as a strategic challenge. Though privately
religious, he viewed his duties as minister in entirely secular terms. Salvation
might be his personal objective, but to Richelieu, the statesman, it was irrelevant.
“Man is immortal, his salvation is hereafter,” he once said. “The state has no
immortality, its salvation is now or never.”6 In other words, states do not receive
credit in any world for doing what is right; they are only rewarded for being
strong enough to do what is necessary.
Richelieu would never have permitted himself to miss the opportunity which
presented itself to Ferdinand in 1629, the eleventh year of the war. The
Protestant princes were ready to accept Habsburg political preeminence provided
they remained free to pursue the religion of their choice and to retain the Church
lands they had seized during the Reformation. But Ferdinand would not
subordinate his religious vocation to his political needs. Rejecting what would
have been a vast triumph and the guarantee of his Empire, determined to stamp
out the Protestant heresy, he issued the Edict of Restitution, which demanded
that Protestant sovereigns restore all the lands they had seized from the Church
since 1555. It was a triumph of zeal over expediency, a classic case in which
faith overrode calculations of political self-interest. And it guaranteed a battle to
the finish.
Handed this opening, Richelieu was determined to prolong the war until
Central Europe had been bled white. He put aside religious scruples with respect
to domestic policy as well. In the Grace of Alais of 1629, he granted to French
Protestants freedom of worship, the very same freedom the Emperor was
fighting to deny the German princes. Having protected his country against the
domestic upheavals rending Central Europe, Richelieu set out to exploit
Ferdinand’s religious fervor in the service of French national ends.
The Habsburg Emperor’s inability to understand his national interests—
indeed, his refusal to accept the validity of any such concept—gave France’s
First Minister the opportunity to support and to subsidize the Protestant German
princes against the Holy Roman Emperor. The role of defender of the liberties of
the Protestant princes against the centralizing goals of the Holy Roman Emperor
was an unlikely one for a French prelate and his Catholic French King, Louis
XIII. That a prince of the Church was subsidizing the Protestant King of
Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus, to make war against the Holy Roman Emperor had
revolutionary implications as profound as the upheavals of the French
Revolution 150 years later.
In an age still dominated by religious zeal and ideological fanaticism, a
dispassionate foreign policy free of moral imperatives stood out like a snowcovered Alp in the desert. Richelieu’s objective was to end what he considered
the encirclement of France, to exhaust the Habsburgs, and to prevent the
emergence of a major power on the borders of France—especially the German
border. His only criterion in making alliances was that they served France’s
interests, and this he did at first with the Protestant states and, later, even with
the Muslim Ottoman Empire. In order to exhaust the belligerents and to prolong
the war, Richelieu subsidized the enemies of his enemies, bribed, fomented
insurrections, and mobilized an extraordinary array of dynastic and legal
arguments. He succeeded so well that the war that had begun in 1618 dragged on
decade after decade until, finally, history found no more appropriate name for it
than its duration—the Thirty Years’ War.
France stood on the sidelines while Germany was devastated, until 1635,
when sheer exhaustion seemed once again to portend an end to the hostilities and
a compromise peace. Richelieu, however, had no interest in compromise until
the French King had become as powerful as the Habsburg Emperor, and
preferably stronger. In pursuit of this goal, Richelieu convinced his sovereign, in
the seventeenth year of the war, of the necessity of entering the fray on the side
of the Protestant princes—and with no better justification than the opportunity to
exploit France’s growing power:
If it is a sign of singular prudence to have held down the forces opposed to your state for a period of
ten years with the forces of your allies, by putting your hand in your pocket and not on your sword,
then to engage in open warfare when your allies can no longer exist without you is a sign of courage
and great wisdom; which shows that, in husbanding the peace of your kingdom, you have behaved
like those economists who, having taken great care to amass money, also know how to spend it….7
The success of a policy of raison d’état depends above all on the ability to assess
power relationships. Universal values are defined by their perception and are not
in need of constant reinterpretation; indeed they are inconsistent with it. But
determining the limits of power requires a blend of experience and insight, and
constant adjustment to circumstance. In theory, of course, the balance of power
should be quite calculable; in practice, it has proved extremely difficult to work
out realistically. Even more complicated is harmonizing one’s calculations with
those of other states, which is the precondition for the operation of a balance of
power. Consensus on the nature of the equilibrium is usually established by
periodic conflict.
Richelieu had no doubt about his ability to master the challenge, convinced as
he was that it was possible to relate means to ends with nearly mathematical
precision. “Logic,” he wrote in his Political Testament, “requires that the thing
that is to be supported and the force that is to support it should stand in
geometrical proportion to each other.”8 Fate had made him a prince of the
Church; conviction put him in the intellectual company of rationalists like
Descartes and Spinoza, who thought that human action could be scientifically
charted; opportunity had enabled him to transform the international order to the
vast advantage of his country. For once, a statesman’s estimate of himself was
accurate. Richelieu had a penetrating perception of his goals, but he—and his
ideas—would not have prevailed had he not been able to gear his tactics to his
strategy.
So novel and so coldblooded a doctrine could not possibly pass without
challenge. However dominant the doctrine of balance of power was to become in
later years, it was deeply offensive to the universalist tradition founded on the
primacy of moral law. One of the most telling critiques came from the renowned
scholar Jansenius, who attacked a policy cut loose from all moral moorings:
Do they believe that a secular, perishable state should outweigh religion and the Church?… Should
not the Most Christian King believe that in the guidance and administration of his realm there is
nothing that obliges him to extend and protect that of Jesus Christ, his Lord?… Would he dare say to
God: Let your power and glory and the religion which teaches men to adore You be lost and
destroyed, provided my state is protected and free of risks?9
That, of course, was precisely what Richelieu was saying to his contemporaries
and, for all we know, to his God. It was the measure of the revolution he had
brought about that what his critics thought was a reductio ad absurdum (an
argument so immoral and dangerous that it refutes itself) was, in fact, a highly
accurate summary of Richelieu’s thought. As the King’s First Minister, he
subsumed both religion and morality to raison d’état, his guiding light.
Demonstrating how well they had absorbed the cynical methods of the master
himself, Richelieu’s defenders turned the argument of their critics against them.
A policy of national self-interest, they argued, represented the highest moral law;
it was Richelieu’s critics who were in violation of ethical principle, not he.
It fell to Daniel de Priezac, a scholar close to the royal administration, to make
the formal rebuttal, almost certainly with Richelieu’s own imprimatur. In
classically Machiavellian fashion, Priezac challenged the premise that Richelieu
was committing mortal sin by pursuing policies which seemed to favor the
spread of heresy. Rather, he argued, it was Richelieu’s critics whose souls were
at risk. Since France was the most pure and devoted of the European Catholic
powers, Richelieu, in serving the interests of France, was serving as well the
interests of the Catholic religion.
Priezac did not explain how he had reached the conclusion that France had
been endowed with such a unique religious vocation. However, it followed from
his premise that strengthening the French state was in the interest of the wellbeing of the Catholic Church; hence Richelieu’s policy was highly moral.
Indeed, the Habsburg encirclement posed so great a threat to France’s security
that it had to be broken, exonerating the French King in whatever methods he
chose to pursue that ultimately moral goal.
He seeks peace by means of war, and if in waging it something happens contrary to his desires, it is
not a crime of will but of necessity whose laws are most harsh and commands most cruel…. A war is
just when the intention that causes it to be undertaken is just…. The will is therefore the principal
element that must be considered, not the means…. [He] who intends to kill the guilty sometimes
faultlessly sheds the blood of the innocent.10
Not to put too fine a point on it, the end justified the means.
Another of Richelieu’s critics, Mathieu de Morgues, accused the Cardinal of
manipulating religion “as your preceptor Machiavelli showed the ancient
Romans doing, shaping it… explaining it and applying it as far as it aids the
advancement of your designs.”11
De Morgues’s criticism was as telling as that of Jansenius, and as ineffective.
Richelieu was indeed the manipulator described, and did use religion precisely in
the manner being alleged. He would no doubt have replied that he had merely
analyzed the world as it was, much as Machiavelli had. Like Machiavelli, he
might well have preferred a world of more refined moral sensibilities, but he was
convinced that history would judge his statesmanship by how well he had used
the conditions and the factors he was given to work with. Indeed, if, in
evaluating a statesman, reaching the goals he sets for himself is a test, Richelieu
must be remembered as one of the seminal figures of modern history. For he left
behind him a world radically different from the one he had found, and set in
motion the policy France would follow for the next three centuries.
In this manner, France became the dominant country in Europe and vastly
expanded its territory. In the century following the Peace of Westphalia of 1648,
ending the Thirty Years’ War, the doctrine of raison d’état grew into the guiding
principle of European diplomacy. Neither the respect in which statesmen of later
centuries would hold Richelieu nor the oblivion which was the fate of his
opponent, Ferdinand II, would have surprised the Cardinal, who was utterly
without illusions, even about himself. “In matters of state,” wrote Richelieu in
his Political Testament, “he who has the power often has the right, and he who is
weak can only with difficulty keep from being wrong in the opinion of the
majority of the world”—a maxim rarely contradicted in the intervening
centuries.12
Richelieu’s impact on the history of Central Europe was the reverse of the
achievements he garnered on France’s behalf He feared a unified Central Europe
and prevented it from coming about. In all likelihood, he delayed German
unification by some two centuries. The initial phase of the Thirty Years’ War can
be viewed as a Habsburg attempt to act as the dynastic unifiers of Germany—
much as England had become a nation-state under the tutelage of a Norman
dynasty and, a few centuries later, the French had followed suit under the
Capetians. Richelieu thwarted the Habsburgs and the Holy Roman Empire was
divided among more than 300 sovereigns, each free to conduct an independent
foreign policy. Germany failed to become a nation-state; absorbed in petty
dynastic quarrels, it turned inward. As a result, Germany developed no national
political culture and calcified into a provincialism from which it did not emerge
until late in the nineteenth century when Bismarck unified it. Germany was
turned into the battleground of most European wars, many of which were
initiated by France, and missed the early wave of European overseas
colonization. When Germany did finally unify, it had so little experience with
defining its national interest that it produced many of this century’s worst
tragedies.
But the gods often punish man by fulfilling his wishes too completely. The
Cardinal’s analysis that success of the Counter-Reformation would reduce
France to an appendage of an increasingly centralized Holy Roman Empire was
almost certainly correct, especially if one assumed, as he must have done, that
the age of the nation-state had arrived. But whereas the nemesis of Wilsonian
idealism is the gap between its professions and reality, the nemesis of raison
d’état is overextension—except in the hands of a master, and it probably is even
then.
For Richelieu’s concept of raison d’état had no built-in limitations. How far
would one go before the interests of the state were deemed satisfied? How many
wars were needed to achieve security? Wilsonian idealism, proclaiming a
selfless policy, is possessed of the constant danger of neglecting the interests of
state; Richelieu’s raison d’état threatens self-destructive tours de force. That is
what happened to France after Louis XIV assumed the throne. Richelieu had
bequeathed to the French kings a preponderantly strong state with a weak and
divided Germany and a decadent Spain on its borders. But Louis XIV gained no
peace of mind from security; he saw in it an opportunity for conquest. In his
overzealous pursuit of raison d’état, Louis XIV alarmed the rest of Europe and
brought together an anti-French coalition which, in the end, thwarted his design.
Nevertheless, for 200 years after Richelieu, France was the most influential
country in Europe, and has remained a major factor in international politics to
this day. Few statesmen of any country can claim an equal achievement. Still,
Richelieu’s greatest successes occurred when he was the only statesman to
jettison the moral and religious restraints of the medieval period. Inevitably,
Richelieu’s successors inherited the task of managing a system in which most
states were operating from his premises. Thereby, France lost the advantage of
having adversaries constrained by moral considerations, as Ferdinand had been
in the time of Richelieu. Once all states played by the same rules, gains became
much more difficult to achieve. For all the glory raison d’état brought France, it
amounted to a treadmill, a never-ending effort to push France’s boundaries
outward, to become the arbiter of the conflicts among the German states and
thereby to dominate Central Europe until France was drained by the effort and
progressively lost the ability to shape Europe according to its design.
Raison d’état provided a rationale for the behavior of individual states, but it
supplied no answer to the challenge of world order. Raison d’état can lead to a
quest for primacy or to establishment of equilibrium. But, rarely does
equilibrium emerge from the conscious design. Usually it results from the
process of thwarting a particular country’s attempt to dominate, as the European
balance of power emerged from the effort to contain France.
In the world inaugurated by Richelieu, states were no longer restrained by the
pretense of a moral code. If the good of the state was the highest value, the duty
of the ruler was the aggrandizement and promotion of his glory. The stronger
would seek to dominate, and the weaker would resist by forming coalitions to
augment their individual strengths. If the coalition was powerful enough to
check the aggressor, a balance of power emerged; if not, some country would
achieve hegemony. The outcome was not foreordained and was therefore tested
by frequent wars. At its beginning, the outcome could as easily have been
empire—French or German—as equilibrium. This is why it took over a hundred
years to establish a European order based explicitly on the balance of power. At
first, the balance of power was an almost incidental fact of life, not a goal of
international politics.
Curiously enough, this is not how it was perceived by the philosophers of the
period. Products of the Enlightenment, they mirrored the eighteenth-century
faith that out of a clash of competing interests harmony and fairness would
emerge. The concept of the balance of power was simply an extension of
conventional wisdom. Its primary goal was to prevent domination by one state
and to preserve the international order; it was not designed to prevent conflicts,
but to limit them. To the hardheaded statesmen of the eighteenth century, the
elimination of conflict (or of ambition or of greed) was Utopian; the solution
was to harness or counterpoise the inherent flaws of human nature to produce the
best possible long-term outcome.
The philosophers of the Enlightenment viewed the international system as part
of a universe operating like a great clockwork which, never standing still,
inexorably advanced toward a better world. In 1751, Voltaire described a
“Christian Europe” as “a sort of great republic divided into several states, some
monarchical, the others mixed… but all in harmony with each other… all
possessing the same principles of public and political law, unknown in other
parts of the world.” These states were “above all… at one in the wise policy of
maintaining among themselves as far as possible an equal balance of power.”13
Montesquieu took up the same theme. For him, the balance of power distilled
unity out of diversity:
The state of things in Europe is that all the states depend on each other…. Europe is a single state
composed of several provinces.14
As these lines were being written, the eighteenth century had already endured
two wars over the Spanish succession, a war over the Polish succession, and a
series of wars over the Austrian succession.
In the same spirit, the philosopher of history Emmerich de Vattel could write
in 1758, the second year of the Seven Years’ War, that:
The continual negotiations that take place, make modern Europe a sort of republic, whose members
—each independent, but all bound together by a common interest—unite for the maintenance of
order and the preservation of liberty. This is what has given rise to the well-known principle of the
balance of power, by which is meant an arrangement of affairs so that no state shall be in a position
to have absolute mastery and dominate over the others.15
The philosophers were confusing the result with the intent. Throughout the
eighteenth century, the princes of Europe fought innumerable wars without there
being a shred of evidence that the conscious goal was to implement any general
notion of international order. At the precise moment when international relations
came to be based on power, so many new factors emerged that calculations
became increasingly unmanageable.
The various dynasties henceforth concentrated on enhancing their security by
territorial expansion. In the process, the relative power positions of several of
them altered drastically. Spain and Sweden were sinking into second-rank status.
Poland began its slide toward extinction. Russia (which had been entirely absent
from the Peace of Westphalia) and Prussia (which played an insignificant role)
were emerging as major powers. The balance of power is difficult enough to
analyze when its components are relatively fixed. The task of assessing it and
reconciling the assessments of the various powers becomes hopelessly intricate
when the relative mights of the powers are in constant flux.
The vacuum created in Central Europe by the Thirty Years’ War tempted the
surrounding countries to encroach upon it. France kept pressing from the west.
Russia was on the march in the east. Prussia expanded in the center of the
Continent. None of the key Continental countries felt any special obligation to
the balance of power so lauded by the philosophers. Russia thought of itself as
too distant. Prussia, as the smallest of the Great Powers, was still too weak to
affect the general equilibrium. Every king consoled himself with the thought that
strengthening his own rule was the greatest possible contribution to the general
peace, and left it to the ubiquitous invisible hand to justify his exertions without
limiting his ambitions.
The nature of raison d’état as an essentially risk-benefit calculation was
shown by the way Frederick the Great justified his seizure of Silesia from
Austria, despite Prussia’s heretofore amicable relations with that state and
despite its being bound by treaty to respect Austria’s territorial integrity:
The superiority of our troops, the promptitude with which we can set them in motion, in a word, the
clear advantage we have over our neighbors, gives us in this unexpected emergency an infinite
superiority over all other powers of Europe…. England and France are foes. If France should meddle
in the affairs of the empire, England could not allow it, so I can always make a good alliance with
one or the other. England could not be jealous of my getting Silesia, which would do her no harm,
and she needs allies. Holland will not care, all the more since the loans of the Amsterdam business
world secured on Silesia will be guaranteed. If we cannot arrange with England and Holland, we can
certainly make a deal with France, who cannot frustrate our designs and will welcome the abasement
of the imperial house. Russia alone might give us trouble. If the empress lives… we can bribe the
leading counsellors. If she dies, the Russians will be so occupied that they will have no time for
foreign affairs….16
Frederick the Great treated international affairs as if it were a game of chess. He
wanted to seize Silesia in order to expand the power of Prussia. The only
obstacle he would recognize to his designs was resistance from superior powers,
not moral scruples. His was a risk/reward analysis: if he conquered Silesia,
would other states retaliate or seek compensation?
Frederick resolved the calculation in his favor. His conquest of Silesia made
Prussia a bona fide Great Power, but it also set off a series of wars as other
countries tried to adjust to this new player. The first was the War of the Austrian
Succession, from 1740 to 1748. In it, Prussia was joined by France, Spain,
Bavaria, and Saxony—which in 1743 switched sides—while Great Britain
supported Austria. In the second war—the Seven Years’ War, from 1756 to 1763
—the roles were reversed. Austria was now joined by Russia, France, Saxony,
and Sweden, while Great Britain and Hanover supported Prussia. The change of
sides was the result of pure calculations of immediate benefit and specific
compensations, not of any overriding principle of international order.
Yet a sort of equilibrium gradually emerged out of this seeming anarchy and
rapine in which each state sought single-mindedly to augment its own power. It
was due not to self-restraint but to the fact that no state, not even France, was
strong enough to impose its will on all the others and thus form an empire. When
any state threatened to become dominant, its neighbors formed a coalition—not
in pursuit of a theory of international relations but out of pure self-interest to
block the ambitions of the most powerful.
These constant wars did not lead to the devastations of the religious wars for
two reasons. Paradoxically, the absolute rulers of the eighteenth century were in
a less strong position to mobilize resources for war than was the case when
religion or ideology or popular government could stir the emotions. They were
restrained by tradition and perhaps by their own insecurity from imposing
income taxes and many other modern exactions, limiting the amount of national
wealth potentially devoted to war, and weapons technology was rudimentary.
Above all, the equilibrium on the Continent was reinforced and in fact
managed by the appearance of a state whose foreign policy was explicitly
dedicated to maintaining the balance. England’s policy was based on throwing
its weight as the occasion required to the weaker and more threatened side to
redress the equilibrium. The original engineer of this policy was King William
III of England, a stern and worldly Dutchman by birth. In his native Holland he
had suffered from the ambitions of the French Sun King and, when he became
King of England, set about forging coalitions to thwart Louis XTV at every turn.
England was the one European country whose raison d’état did not require it to
expand in Europe. Perceiving its national interest to be in the preservation of the
European balance, it was the one country which sought no more for itself on the
Continent than preventing the domination of Europe by a single power. In
pursuit of that objective, it made itself available to any combination of nations
opposing such an enterprise.
A balance of power gradually emerged by means of shifting coalitions under
British leadership against French attempts to dominate Europe. This dynamic lay
at the core of almost every war fought in the eighteenth century and every
British-led coalition against French hegemony fought in the name of the
selfsame European liberties which Richelieu had first invoked in Germany
against the Habsburgs. The balance of power held because the nations resisting
French domination were too strong to be overcome, and because a century and a
half of expansionism progressively drained France of its wealth.
Great Britain’s role as the balancer reflected a geopolitical fact of life. The
survival of a relatively small island off the coast of Europe would have been
jeopardized had all the resources of the Continent been mobilized under a single
ruler. For, in such a case, England (as it was before its union with Scotland in
1707) possessed much smaller resources and population and would have sooner
or later been at the mercy of a Continental empire.
England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 forced it into an immediate
confrontation with Louis XIV of France. The Glorious Revolution had deposed
the Catholic King, James II. Searching for a Protestant replacement on the
Continent, England chose William of Orange, ruler (Stadthalter) of the
Netherlands, who had a tenuous claim to the British throne through his marriage
to Mary, the daughter of the deposed King. With William, England imported an
ongoing war with Louis XIV over what later became Belgium, a land full of
important fortresses and harbors within perilously easy reach of the British coast
(though this concern developed only over time). William knew that if Louis XIV
succeeded in occupying these fortresses, the Netherlands would lose their
independence, the prospects for French domination in Europe would multiply,
and England would be directly threatened. William’s resolve to send English
troops to fight for present-day Belgium against France was a precursor of the
British decision to fight for Belgium in 1914 when the Germans invaded it.
Henceforth, William would spearhead the fight against Louis XIV. Short,
hunchbacked, and asthmatic, William did not at first glance appear to be the man
destined to humble the Sun King. But the Prince of Orange possessed an iron
will combined with extraordinary mental agility. He convinced himself—almost
certainly correctly—that if Louis XIV, already the most powerful monarch in
Europe, were permitted to conquer the Spanish Netherlands (present-day
Belgium), England would be at risk. A coalition capable of reining in the French
King had to be forged, not as a matter of the abstract theory of balance of power
but for the sake of the independence of both the Netherlands and of England.
William recognized that Louis XIV’s designs on Spain and its possessions, if
realized, would turn France into a superpower that no combination of states
would be able to challenge. To forestall that danger, he sought out partners and
soon found them. Sweden, Spain, Savoy, the Austrian Emperor, Saxony, the
Dutch Republic, and England formed the Grand Alliance—the greatest coalition
of forces aligned against a single power that modern Europe had ever seen. For
about a quarter of a century (1688–1713), Louis waged almost constant wars
against this coalition. In the end, however, France’s pursuit of raison d’état was
reined in by the self-interest of Europe’s other states. France would remain the
strongest state in Europe, but it would not become dominant. It was a textbook
case of the functioning of the balance of power.
William’s hostility to Louis XIV was neither personal nor based on any antiFrench sentiment; it reflected his cold assessment of the Sun King’s power and
boundless ambition. William once confided to an aide that, had he lived in the
1550s, when the Habsburgs were threatening to become dominant, he would
have been “as much a Frenchman as he was now a Spaniard”17—a precursor of
Winston Churchill’s reply in the 1930s to the charge that he was anti-German:
“If the circumstances were reversed, we could equally be pro-German and antiFrench.”18
William was perfectly willing to negotiate with Louis XIV when he felt the
balance of power could best be served by doing so. For William, the simple
calculation was that England would try to maintain a rough balance between the
Habsburgs and the Bourbons, so that whoever was weaker would maintain, with
British help, the equilibrium of Europe. Ever since Richelieu, the weaker side
had been Austria, and therefore Great Britain aligned itself with the Habsburgs
against French expansionism.
The idea of acting as the balancer did not commend itself to the British public
when it first made its appearance. In the late seventeenth century, British public
opinion was isolationist, much like that of America two centuries later. The
prevailing argument had it that there would be time enough to resist a threat,
when and if the threat presented itself. There was no need to fight conjectural
dangers based on what some country might do later on.
William played the equivalent of Theodore Roosevelt’s later role in America,
warning his essentially isolationist people that their safety depended on
participation in a balance of power overseas. And his countrymen accepted his
views far more quickly than Americans embraced Roosevelt’s. Some twenty
years after William’s death, The Craftsman, a newspaper typically representative
of the opposition, noted that the balance of power was one of “the original,
everlasting principles of British politics,” and that peace on the Continent was
“so essential a circumstance to the prosperity of a trading island, that… it ought
to be the constant endeavor of a British ministry to preserve it themselves, and to
restore it, when broken or disturbed by others.”19
Agreeing on the importance of the balance of power did not, however, still
British disputes about the best strategy to implement the policy. There were two
schools of thought, representing the two major political parties in Parliament,
and substantially paralleling a similar disagreement in the United States after the
two world wars. The Whigs argued that Great Britain should engage itself only
when the balance was actually threatened, and then only long enough to remove
the threat. By contrast, the Tories believed that Great Britain’s main duty was to
shape and not simply to protect the balance of power. The Whigs were of the
view that there would be plenty of time to resist an assault on the Low Countries
after it had actually occurred; the Tories reasoned that a policy of wait-and-see
might allow an aggressor to weaken the balance irreparably. Therefore, if Great
Britain wished to avoid fighting in Dover, it had to resist aggression along the
Rhine or wherever else in Europe the balance of power seemed to be threatened.
The Whigs considered alliances as temporary expedients, to be terminated once
victory had rendered the common purpose moot, whereas the Tories urged
British participation in permanent cooperative arrangements to enable Great
Britain to help shape events and to preserve the peace.
Lord Carteret, Tory Foreign Secretary from 1742 to 1744, made an eloquent
case for a permanent engagement in Europe. He denounced the Whigs’
inclination “to disregard all the troubles and commotions of the continent, not to
leave our own island in search of enemies, but to attend our commerce and our
pleasures, and, instead of courting danger in foreign countries, to sleep in
security, till we are awakened by an alarm upon our coasts.” But Great Britain,
he said, needed to face the reality of its permanent interest in bolstering the
Habsburgs as a counterweight to France, “for if the French monarch once saw
himself freed from a rival on that continent, he would sit secure in possession of
his conquests, he might then reduce his garrisons, abandon his fortresses, and
discharge his troops; but that treasure which now fills the plains with soldiers,
would soon be employed in designs more dangerous to our country…. We must
consequently, my lords,… support the House of Austria which is the only power
that can be placed in the balance against the princes of the family of Bourbon.”20
The difference between the foreign-policy strategies of the Whigs and the
Tories was practical, not philosophical; tactical, not strategic; and it reflected
each party’s assessment of Great Britain’s vulnerability. The Whigs’ policy of
wait-and-see reflected the conviction that Great Britain’s margin of safety was
wide indeed. The Tories found Great Britain’s position more precarious. Almost
precisely the same distinction would separate American isolationists and
American globalists in the twentieth century. Neither Great Britain in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries nor America in the twentieth found it easy to
persuade the citizenry that its safety required permanent commitment rather than
isolation.
Periodically, in both countries, a leader would emerge who put before his
people the need for permanent engagement. Wilson produced the League of
Nations; Carteret flirted with permanent engagements on the Continent;
Castlereagh, Foreign Secretary from 1812 to 1821, advocated a system of
European congresses; and Gladstone, Prime Minister in the late nineteenth
century, proposed the first version of collective security. In the end, their appeals
failed, because, until after the end of the Second World War, neither the English
nor the American people could be convinced that they faced a mortal challenge
until it was clearly upon them.
In this manner, Great Britain became the balancer of the European
equilibrium, first almost by default, later by conscious strategy. Without Great
Britain’s tenacious commitment to that role, France would almost surely have
achieved hegemony over Europe in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, and
Germany would have done the same in the modern period. In that sense,
Churchill could rightly claim two centuries later that Great Britain had
“preserved the liberties of Europe.”21
Early in the nineteenth century, Great Britain turned its ad hoc defense of the
balance of power into a conscious design. Until then, it had gone about its policy
pragmatically, consistent with the genius of the British people, resisting any
country threatening the equilibrium—which, in the eighteenth century, was
invariably France. Wars ended with compromise, usually marginally enhancing
the position of France but depriving it of the hegemony which was its real goal.
Inevitably, France provided the occasion for the first detailed statement of
what Great Britain understood by the balance of power. Having sought
preeminence for a century and a half in the name of raison d’état, France after
the Revolution had returned to earlier concepts of universality. No longer did
France invoke raison d’état for its expansionism, even less the glory of its fallen
kings. After the Revolution, France made war on the rest of Europe to preserve
its revolution and to spread republican ideals throughout Europe. Once again, a
preponderant France was threatening to dominate Europe. Conscript armies and
ideological fervor propelled French armies across Europe on behalf of universal
principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Under Napoleon, they came within
a hairsbreadth of establishing a European commonwealth centered on France. By
1807, French armies had set up satellite kingdoms along the Rhine in Italy and
Spain, reduced Prussia to a second-rank power, and gravely weakened Austria.
Only Russia stood between Napoleon and France’s domination of Europe.
Yet Russia already inspired the ambivalent reaction—part hope and part fear
—that was to be its lot until the present day. At the beginning of the eighteenth
century, the Russian frontier had been on the Dnieper; a century later, it reached
the Vistula, 500 miles farther west. At the beginning of the eighteenth century,
Russia had been fighting for its existence against Sweden at Poltava, deep in
present-day Ukraine. By the middle of the century, it was participating in the
Seven Years’ War, and its troops were at Berlin. By the end of the century, it
would be the principal agent in the partition of Poland.
Russia’s raw physical power was made all the more ominous by the merciless
autocracy of its domestic institutions. Its absolutism was not mitigated by
custom or by an assertive and independent aristocracy, as was the case with the
monarchs ruling by divine right in Western Europe. In Russia, everything
depended on the whim of the tsar. It was entirely possible for Russian foreign
policy to veer from liberalism to conservatism depending on the mood of the
incumbent tsar—as indeed it did under the reigning Tsar Alexander I. At home,
however, no liberal experiment was ever attempted.
In 1804, the mercurial Alexander I, Tsar of all the Russias, approached British
Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, Napoleon’s most implacable enemy,
with a proposition. Heavily influenced by the philosophers of the Enlightenment,
Alexander I imagined himself as the moral conscience of Europe and was in the
last phase of his temporary infatuation with liberal institutions. In that frame of
mind, he proposed to Pitt a vague scheme for universal peace, calling for all
nations to reform their constitutions with a view to ending feudalism and
adopting constitutional rule. The reformed states would thereupon abjure force
and submit their disputes with one another to arbitration. The Russian autocrat
thus became the unlikely precursor of the Wilsonian idea that liberal institutions
were the prerequisite to peace, though he never went so far as to seek to translate
these principles into practice among his own people. And within a few years, he
would move to the opposite conservative extreme of the political spectrum.
Pitt now found himself in much the same position vis-à-vis Alexander as
Churchill would find himself vis-à-vis Stalin nearly 150 years later. He
desperately needed Russian support against Napoleon, for it was impossible to
imagine how Napoleon could be defeated in any other way. On the other hand,
Pitt had no more interest than Churchill would later have in replacing one
dominant country with another, or in endorsing Russia as the arbiter of Europe.
Above all, British domestic inhibitions did not allow any prime minister to
commit his country to basing peace on the political and social reform of Europe.
No British war had ever been fought for such a cause, because the British people
did not feel threatened by social and political upheavals on the Continent, only
by changes in the balance of power.
Pitt’s reply to Alexander I captured all of these elements. Ignoring the
Russian’s call for the political reform of Europe, he outlined the equilibrium that
would need to be constructed if peace was to be preserved. A general European
settlement was now being envisaged for the first time since the Peace of
Westphalia a century and a half before. And, for the first time ever, a settlement
would be explicitly based on the principles of the balance of power.
Pitt saw the principal cause for instability in the weakness of Central Europe,
which had repeatedly tempted French incursion and attempts at predominance.
(He was too polite and too eager for Russian help to point out that a Central
Europe strong enough to withstand French pressures would be equally in a
position to thwart Russian expansionist temptations.) A European settlement
needed to begin by depriving France of all her postrevolutionary conquests and,
in the process, restore the independence of the Low Countries, thereby neatly
making the chief British concern a principle of settlement.22
Reducing French preponderance would be of no use, however, if the 300-odd
smaller German states continued to tempt French pressure and intervention. To
thwart such ambitions, Pitt thought it necessary to create “great masses” in the
center of Europe by consolidating the German principalities into larger
groupings. Some of the states which had joined France or collapsed
ignominiously would be annexed by Prussia or Austria. Others would be formed
into larger units.
Pitt avoided any reference to a European government. Instead, he proposed
that Great Britain, Prussia, Austria, and Russia guarantee the new territorial
arrangement in Europe by means of a permanent alliance directed against French
aggression—just as Franklin D. Roosevelt later tried to base the post–World War
II international order on an alliance against Germany and Japan. Neither Great
Britain in the Napoleonic period nor America in World War II could imagine that
the biggest threat to peace in the future might prove to be the current ally rather
than the yet-to-be-defeated enemy. It was a measure of the fear of Napoleon that
a British prime minister should have been willing to agree to what heretofore
had been so adamantly rejected by his country—a permanent engagement on the
Continent—and that Great Britain should impair its tactical flexibility by basing
its policy on the assumption of a permanent enemy.
The emergence of the European balance of power in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries parallels certain aspects of the post–Cold War world. Then,
as now, a collapsing world order spawned a multitude of states pursuing their
national interests, unrestrained by any overriding principles. Then, as now, the
states making up the international order were groping for some definition of their
international role. Then the various states decided to rely entirely on asserting
their national interest, putting their trust in the socalled unseen hand. The issue is
whether the post–Cold War world can find some principle to restrain the
assertion of power and self-interest. Of course, in the end a balance of power
always comes about de facto when several states interact. The question is
whether the maintenance of the international system can turn into a conscious
design, or whether it will grow out of a series of tests of strength.
By the time the Napoleonic Wars were ending, Europe was ready to design—
for the only time in its history—an international order based on the principles of
the balance of power. It had been learned in the crucible of the wars of the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that the balance of power could not be
left to the residue of the collision of the European states. Pitt’s plan had outlined
a territorial settlement to rectify the weaknesses of the eighteenth-century world
order. But Pitt’s Continental allies had learned an additional lesson.
Power is too difficult to assess, and the willingness to vindicate it too various,
to permit treating it as a reliable guide to international order. Equilibrium works
best if it is buttressed by an agreement on common values. The balance of power
inhibits the capacity to overthrow the international order; agreement on shared
values inhibits the desire to overthrow the international order. Power without
legitimacy tempts tests of strength; legitimacy without power tempts empty
posturing.
Combining both elements was the challenge and the success of the Congress
of Vienna, which established a century of international order uninterrupted by a
general war.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Concert of Europe: Great Britain,
Austria, and Russia
While Napoleon was enduring his first exile, at Elba, the victors of the
Napoleonic Wars assembled at Vienna in September 1814 to plan the postwar
world. The Congress of Vienna continued to meet all during Napoleon’s escape
from Elba and his final defeat at Waterloo. In the meantime, the need to rebuild
the international order had become even more urgent.
Prince von Metternich served as Austria’s negotiator, though, with the
Congress meeting in Vienna, the Austrian Emperor was never far from the scene.
The King of Prussia sent Prince von Hardenberg, and the newly restored Louis
XVIII of France relied on Talleyrand, who thereby maintained his record of
having served every French ruler since before the revolution. Tsar Alexander I,
refusing to yield the Russian pride of place to anyone, came to speak for himself.
The English Foreign Secretary, Lord Castlereagh, negotiated on Great Britain’s
behalf.
These five men achieved what they had set out to do. After the Congress of
Vienna, Europe experienced the longest period of peace it had ever known. No
war at all took place among the Great Powers for forty years, and after the
Crimean War of 1854, no general war for another sixty. The Vienna settlement
corresponded to the Pitt Plan so literally that, when Castlereagh submitted it to
Parliament, he attached a draft of the original British design to show how closely
it had been followed.
Paradoxically, this international order, which was created more explicitly in
the name of the balance of power than any other before or since, relied the least
on power to maintain itself. This unique state of affairs occurred partly because
the equilibrium was designed so well that it could only be overthrown by an
effort of a magnitude too difficult to mount. But the most important reason was
that the Continental countries were knit together by a sense of shared values.
There was not only a physical equilibrium, but a moral one. Power and justice
were in substantial harmony. The balance of power reduces the opportunities for
using force; a shared sense of justice reduces the desire to use force. An
international order which is not considered just will be challenged sooner or
later. But how a people perceives the fairness of a particular world order is
determined as much by its domestic institutions as by judgments on tactical
foreign-policy issues. For that reason, compatibility between domestic
institutions is a reinforcement for peace. Ironic as it may seem, Metternich
presaged Wilson, in the sense that he believed that a shared concept of justice
was a prerequisite for international order, however diametrically opposed his
idea of justice was to what Wilson sought to institutionalize in the twentieth
century.
Creating the general balance of power proved relatively simple. The statesmen
followed the Pitt Plan like an architect’s drawing. Since the idea of national selfdetermination had not yet been invented, they were not in the least concerned
with carving states of ethnic homogeneity out of the territory reconquered from
Napoleon. Austria was strengthened in Italy, and Prussia in Germany. The Dutch
Republic acquired the Austrian Netherlands (mostly present-day Belgium).
France had to give up all conquests and return to the “ancient frontiers” it had
possessed before the Revolution. Russia received the heartland of Poland. (In
conformity with its policy of not making acquisitions on the Continent, Great
Britain confined its territorial gains to the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip
of Africa.) In Great Britain’s concept of world order, the test of the balance of
power was how well the various nations could perform the roles assigned to
them in the overall design—much as the United States came to regard its
alliances in the period after the Second World War. In implementing this
approach, Great Britain faced with respect to the Continental countries the same
difference in perspective that the United States encountered during the Cold War.
For nations simply do not define their purpose as cogs in a security system.
Security makes their existence possible; it is never their sole or even principal
purpose.
Austria and Prussia no more thought of themselves as “great masses” than
France would later see the purpose of NATO in terms of a division of labor. The
overall balance of power meant little to Austria and Prussia if it did not at the
same time do justice to their own special and complex relationship, or take
account of their countries’ historic roles.
After the Habsburgs’ failure to achieve hegemony in Central Europe in the
Thirty Years’ War, Austria had abandoned its attempt to dominate all of
Germany. In 1806, the vestigial Holy Roman Empire was abolished. But Austria
still saw itself as first among equals and was determined to keep every other
German state, especially Prussia, from assuming Austria’s historic leadership
role.
And Austria had every reason to be watchful. Ever since Frederick the Great
had seized Silesia, Austria’s claim to leadership in Germany had been challenged
by Prussia. A ruthless diplomacy, devotion to the military arts, and a highly
developed sense of discipline propelled Prussia in the course of a century from a
secondary principality on the barren North German plain to a kingdom which,
though still the smallest of the Great Powers, was militarily among the most
formidable. Its oddly shaped frontiers stretched across Northern Germany from
the partly Polish east to the somewhat Latinized Rhineland (which was separated
from Prussia’s original territory by the Kingdom of Hanover), providing the
Prussian state with an overwhelming sense of national mission—if for no higher
purpose than to defend its fragmented territories.
Both the relationship between these two largest German states and their
relationship to the other German states were central to European stability.
Indeed, at least since the Thirty Years’ War, Germany’s internal arrangements
had presented Europe with the same dilemma: whenever Germany was weak and
divided, it tempted its neighbors, especially France, into expansionism. At the
same time, the prospect of German unity terrified surrounding states, and has
continued to do so even in our own time. Richelieu’s fear that a united Germany
might dominate Europe and overwhelm France had been anticipated by a British
observer who wrote in 1609: “…as for Germany, which if it were entirely
subject to one Monarchy, would be terrible to all the rest.”1 Historically,
Germany has been either too weak or too strong for the peace of Europe.
The architects at the Congress of Vienna recognized that, if Central Europe
were to have peace and stability, they would have to undo Richelieu’s work of
the 1600s. Richelieu had fostered a weak, fragmented Central Europe, providing
France with a standing temptation to encroach and to turn it into a virtual
playground for the French army. Thus, the statesmen at Vienna set about
consolidating, but not unifying, Germany. Austria and Prussia were the leading
German states, after which came a number of medium-sized states—Bavaria,
Württemberg, and Saxony among them—which had been enlarged and
strengthened. The 300-odd pre-Napoleonic states were combined into some
thirty and bound together in a new entity called the German Confederation.
Providing for common defense against outside aggression, the German
Confederation proved to be an ingenious creation. It was too strong to be
attacked by France, but too weak and decentralized to threaten its neighbors. The
Confederation balanced Prussia’s superior military strength against Austria’s
superior prestige and legitimacy. The purpose of the Confederation was to
forestall German unity on a national basis, to preserve the thrones of the various
German princes and monarchs, and to forestall French aggression. It succeeded
on all these counts.
In dealing with the defeated enemy, the victors designing a peace settlement
must navigate the transition from the intransigence vital to victory to the
conciliation needed to achieve a lasting peace. A punitive peace mortgages the
international order because it saddles the victors, drained by their wartime
exertions, with the task of holding down a country determined to undermine the
settlement. Any country with a grievance is assured of finding nearly automatic
support from the disaffected defeated party. This would be the bane of the Treaty
of Versailles.
The victors at the Congress of Vienna, like the victors in the Second World
War, avoided making this mistake. It was no easy matter to be generous toward
France, which had been trying to dominate Europe for a century and a half and
whose armies had camped among its neighbors for a quarter of a century.
Nevertheless, the statesmen at Vienna concluded that Europe would be safer if
France were relatively satisfied rather than resentful and disaffected. France was
deprived of its conquests, but granted its “ancient”—that is, prerevolutionary—
frontiers, even though this represented a considerably larger territory than the
one Richelieu had ruled. Castlereagh, the Foreign Minister of Napoleon’s most
implacable foe, made the case that:
The continued excesses of France may, no doubt, yet drive Europe… to a measure of
dismemberment… [but] let the Allies then take this further chance of securing that repose which all
the Powers of Europe so much require, with the assurance that if disappointed… they will again take
up arms, not only with commanding positions in their hands, but with that moral force which can
alone keep such a confederacy together….2
By 1818, France was admitted to the Congress system at periodic European
congresses, which for half a century came close to constituting the government
of Europe.
Convinced that the various nations understood their self-interest sufficiently to
defend it if challenged, Great Britain would probably have been content to leave
matters there. The British believed no formal guarantee was either required or
could add much to commonsense analysis. The countries of Central Europe,
however, victims of wars for a century and a half, insisted on tangible
assurances.
Austria in particular faced dangers that were inconceivable to Great Britain. A
vestige of feudal times, Austria was a polyglot empire, grouping together the
multiple nationalities of the Danube basin around its historic positions in
Germany and Northern Italy. Aware of the increasingly dissonant currents of
liberalism and nationalism which threatened its existence, Austria sought to spin
a web of moral restraint to forestall tests of strength. Metternich’s consummate
skill was in inducing the key countries to submit their disagreements to a sense
of shared values. Talleyrand expressed the importance of having some principle
of restraint this way:
If… the minimum of resisting power… were equal to the maximum of aggressive power… there
would be a real equilibrium. But… the actual situation admits solely of an equilibrium which is
artificial and precarious and which can only last so long as certain large States are animated by a
spirit of moderation and justice.3
After the Congress of Vienna, the relationship between the balance of power and
a shared sense of legitimacy was expressed in two documents: the Quadruple
Alliance, consisting of Great Britain, Prussia, Austria, and Russia; and the Holy
Alliance, which was limited to the three socalled Eastern Courts—Prussia,
Austria, and Russia. In the early nineteenth century, France was regarded with
the same fear as Germany has been in the twentieth century—as a chronically
aggressive, inherently destabilizing power. Therefore, the statesmen at Vienna
forged the Quadruple Alliance, designed to nip any aggressive French tendencies
in the bud with overwhelming force. Had the victors convening at Versailles
made a similar alliance in 1918, the world might never have suffered a Second
World War.
The Holy Alliance was altogether different; Europe had not seen such a
document since Ferdinand II had left the throne of the Holy Roman Empire
nearly two centuries earlier. It was proposed by the Russian Tsar, who could not
bring himself to abandon his self-appointed mission to revamp the international
system and reform its participants. In 1804, Pitt had deflated his proposed
crusade for liberal institutions; by 1815, Alexander was imbued with too strong a
sense of victory to be thus denied—regardless that his current crusade was the
exact opposite of what he had advocated eleven years earlier. Now Alexander
was in thrall to religion and to conservative values and proposed nothing less
than a complete reform of the international system based on the proposition that
“the course formerly adopted by the Powers in their mutual relations had to be
fundamentally changed and that it was urgent to replace it with an order of things
based on the exalted truths of the eternal religion of our Saviour.”4
The Austrian Emperor joked that he was at a loss as to whether to discuss
these ideas in the Council of Ministers or in the confessional. But he also knew
that he could neither join the Tsar’s crusade nor, in rebuffing it, give Alexander a
pretext to go it alone, leaving Austria to face the liberal and national currents of
the period without allies. This is why Metternich transformed the Tsar’s draft
into what came to be known as the Holy Alliance, which interpreted the religious
imperative as an obligation by the signatories to preserve the domestic status quo
in Europe. For the first time in modern history, the European Powers had given
themselves a common mission.
No British statesman could possibly have joined any enterprise establishing a
general right—indeed, an obligation—to intervene in the domestic affairs of
other states. Castlereagh called the Holy Alliance a “piece of sublime mysticism
and nonsense.”5 Metternich, however, saw in it an opportunity to commit the
Tsar to sustain legitimate rule, and above all to keep him from experimenting
with his missionary impulses unilaterally and without restraint. The Holy
Alliance brought the conservative monarchs together in combatting revolution,
but it also obliged them to act only in concert, in effect giving Austria a
theoretical veto over the adventures of its smothering Russian ally. The socalled
Concert of Europe implied that nations which were competitive on one level
would settle matters affecting overall stability by consensus.
The Holy Alliance was the most original aspect of the Vienna settlement. Its
exalted name has diverted attention from its operational significance, which was
to introduce an element of moral restraint into the relationship of the Great
Powers. The vested interest which they developed in the survival of their
domestic institutions caused the Continental countries to avoid conflicts which
they would have pursued as a matter of course in the previous century.
It would be too simple to argue, however, that compatible domestic
institutions guarantee a peaceful balance of power by themselves. In the
eighteenth century, all the rulers of the Continental countries governed by divine
right—their domestic institutions were eminently compatible. Yet these same
rulers governed with a feeling of permanence and conducted endless wars with
each other precisely because they considered their domestic institutions
unassailable.
Woodrow Wilson was not the first to believe that the nature of domestic
institutions determined a state’s behavior internationally. Metternich believed
that too but on the basis of an entirely different set of premises. Whereas Wilson
believed the democracies to be peace-loving and reasonable by their very nature,
Metternich considered them dangerous and unpredictable. Having witnessed the
suffering that a republican France had inflicted on Europe, Metternich identified
peace with legitimate rule. He expected the crowned heads of ancient dynasties,
if not to preserve the peace, then at least to preserve the basic structure of
international relations. In this manner, legitimacy became the cement by which
the international order was held together.
The difference between the Wilsonian and the Metternich approaches to
domestic justice and international order is fundamental to understanding the
contrasting views of America and Europe. Wilson crusaded for principles which
he perceived as revolutionary and new. Metternich sought to institutionalize
values he considered ancient. Wilson, presiding over a country consciously
created to set man free, was persuaded that democratic values could be legislated
and then embodied in entirely new worldwide institutions. Metternich,
representing an ancient country whose institutions had developed gradually,
almost imperceptibly, did not believe that rights could be created by legislation.
“Rights,” according to Metternich, simply existed in the nature of things.
Whether they were affirmed by laws or by constitutions was an essentially
technical question which had nothing to do with bringing about freedom.
Metternich considered guaranteeing rights to be a paradox: “Things which ought
to be taken for granted lose their force when they emerge in the form of arbitrary
pronouncements…. Objects mistakenly made subject to legislation result only in
the limitation, if not the complete annulment, of that which is attempted to be
safeguarded.”6
Some of Metternich’s maxims were self-serving rationalizations of the
practices of the Austrian Empire, which was incapable of adjusting to the
emerging new world. But Metternich also reflected the rationalist conviction that
laws and rights existed in nature and not by fiat. His formative experience had
been the French Revolution, which started with the proclamation of the Rights of
Man and ended with the Reign of Terror. Wilson emerged from a far more
benign national experience and, fifteen years before the rise of modern
totalitarianism, could not conceive of aberrations in the popular will.
In the post-Vienna period, Metternich played the decisive role in managing the
international system and in interpreting the requirements of the Holy Alliance.
Metternich was forced to assume this role because Austria was in the direct path
of every storm, and its domestic institutions were less and less compatible with
the national and liberal trends of the century. Prussia loomed over Austria’s
position in Germany, and Russia over its Slavic populations in the Balkans. And
there was always France, eager to reclaim Richelieu’s legacy in Central Europe.
Metternich knew that, if these dangers were permitted to turn into tests of
strength, Austria would exhaust itself, whatever the outcome of any particular
conflict. His policy, therefore, was to avoid crises by building a moral consensus
and to deflect those which could not be avoided by discreetly backing whichever
nation was willing to bear the brunt of the confrontation—Great Britain vis-à-vis
France in the Low Countries, Great Britain and France vis-à-vis Russia in the
Balkans, the smaller states vis-à-vis Prussia in Germany.
Metternich’s extraordinary diplomatic skill permitted him to translate familiar
diplomatic verities into operational foreign policy principles. He managed to
convince Austria’s two closest allies, each of which represented a geopolitical
threat to the Austrian Empire, that the ideological danger posed by revolution
outweighed their strategic opportunities. Had Prussia sought to exploit German
nationalism, it could have challenged Austrian preeminence in Germany a
generation before Bismarck. Had Tsars Alexander I and Nicholas I only
considered solely Russia’s geopolitical opportunities, they would have exploited
the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire far more decisively to Austria’s peril—
as their successors would do later in the century. Both refrained from pushing
their advantage because it ran counter to the dominant principle of maintaining
the status quo. Austria, seemingly on its deathbed after Napoleon’s onslaught,
was given a new lease on life by the Metternich system, which enabled it to
survive for another hundred years.
The man who saved this anachronistic empire and guided its policy for nearly
fifty years did not even visit Austria until he was thirteen years old or live there
until he was seventeen.7 Prince Klemens von Metternich’s father had been
governor general of the Rhineland, then a Habsburg possession. A cosmopolitan
figure, Metternich was always more comfortable speaking French than German.
“For a long time now,” he wrote to Wellington in 1824, “Europe has had for me
the quality of a fatherland [patrie].”8 Contemporary opponents sneered at his
righteous maxims and polished epigrams. But Voltaire and Kant would have
understood his views. A rationalist product of the Enlightenment, he found
himself propelled into a revolutionary struggle which was foreign to his
temperament, and into becoming the leading minister of a state under siege
whose structure he could not modify.
Sobriety of spirit and moderation of objective were the Metternich style:
“Little given to abstract ideas, we accept things as they are and we attempt to the
maximum of our ability to protect ourselves against delusions about realities.”9
And, “with phrases which on close examination dissolve into thin air, such as the
defense of civilization, nothing tangible can be defined.”10
With such attitudes, Metternich strove to avoid being swept away by the
emotion of the moment. As soon as Napoleon was defeated in Russia, and before
Russian troops had even reached Central Europe, Metternich had identified
Russia as a potential long-term threat. At a time when Austria’s neighbors were
concentrating on liberation from French rule, he made Austria’s participation in
the anti-Napoleon coalition dependent on the elaboration of war aims compatible
with the survival of his rickety empire. Metternich’s attitude was the exact
opposite of the position taken by the democracies during the Second World War,
when they found themselves in comparable circumstances vis-à-vis the Soviet
Union. Like Castlereagh and Pitt, Metternich believed that a strong Central
Europe was the prerequisite to European stability. Determined to avoid tests of
strength if at all possible, Metternich was as concerned with establishing a
moderating style as he was with accumulating raw power:
The attitude of the [European] powers differs as their geographical situation. France and Russia have
but a single frontier and this hardly vulnerable. The Rhine with its triple line of fortresses assures the
repose of… France; a frightful climate… makes the Niemen a no less safe frontier for Russia. Austria
and Prussia find themselves exposed on all sides to attack by their neighbouring powers.
Continuously menaced by the preponderance of these two powers, Austria and Prussia can find
tranquillity only in a wise and measured policy, in relations of goodwill among each other and with
their neighbours…11
Though Austria needed Russia as a hedge against France, it was wary of its
impetuous ally, and especially of the Tsar’s crusading bent. Talleyrand said of
Tsar Alexander I that he was not for nothing the son of the mad Tsar Paul.
Metternich described Alexander as a “strange combination of masculine virtues
and feminine weaknesses. Too weak for true ambition, but too strong for pure
vanity.”12
For Metternich, the problem posed by Russia was not so much how to contain
its aggressiveness—an endeavor which would have exhausted Austria—as how
to temper its ambitions. “Alexander desires the peace of the world,” reported an
Austrian diplomat, “but not for the sake of peace and its blessings; rather for his
own sake; not unconditionally, but with mental reservations: he must remain the
arbiter of this peace; from him must emanate the repose and happiness of the
world and all of Europe must recognize that this repose is his work, that it is
dependent on his goodwill and that it can be disturbed by his whim….”13
Castlereagh and Metternich parted company over how to contain a mercurial
and meddlesome Russia. As the Foreign Minister of an island power far from the
scene of confrontation, Castlereagh was prepared to resist only overt attacks, and
even then the attacks had to threaten the equilibrium. Metternich’s country, on
the other hand, lay in the center of the Continent and could not take such
chances. Precisely because Metternich distrusted Alexander, he insisted on
staying close to him and concentrated on keeping threats from his direction from
ever arising. “If one cannon is fired,” he wrote, “Alexander will escape us at the
head of his retinue and then there will be no limit any longer to what he will
consider his divinely ordained laws.”14
To dilute Alexander’s zealousness, Metternich pursued a two-pronged
strategy. Under his leadership, Austria was in the vanguard of the fight against
nationalism, though he was adamant about not permitting Austria to be too
exposed or to engage in unilateral acts. He was even less inclined to encourage
others to act on their own, partly because he feared Russia’s missionary zeal
could turn into expansionism. For Metternich, moderation was a philosophical
virtue and a practical necessity. In his instructions to an Austrian ambassador, he
once wrote: “It is more important to eliminate the claims of others than to press
our own…. We will obtain much in proportion as we ask little.”15 Whenever
possible, he tried to temper the Tsar’s crusading schemes by involving him in
time-consuming consultations and by limiting him to what the European
consensus would tolerate.
The second prong of Metternich’s strategy was conservative unity. Whenever
action became unavoidable, Metternich would resort to a juggling act which he
once described as follows: “Austria considers everything with reference to the
substance. Russia wants above all the form; Britain wants the substance without
the form…. It will be our task to combine the impossibilities of Britain with the
modes of Russia.”16 Metternich’s dexterity enabled Austria to control the pace of
events for a generation by turning Russia, a country he feared, into a partner on
the basis of the unity of conservative interests, and Great Britain, which he
trusted, into a last resort for resisting challenges to the balance of power. The
inevitable outcome, however, would merely be delayed. Even so, to have
preserved an ancient state on the basis of values inconsistent with the dominant
trends all around it for a full century is not a mean achievement.
Metternich’s dilemma was that, the closer he moved toward the Tsar, the more
he risked his British connection; and the more he risked that, the closer he had to
move toward the Tsar to avoid isolation. For Metternich, the ideal combination
would have been British support to preserve the territorial balance, and Russian
support to quell domestic upheaval—the Quadruple Alliance for geopolitical
security, and the Holy Alliance for domestic stability.
But as time passed and the memory of Napoleon faded, that combination
became increasingly difficult to sustain. The more the alliances approached a
system of collective security and European government, the more Great Britain
felt compelled to dissociate itself from it. And the more Great Britain dissociated
itself, the more dependent Austria became on Russia, hence the more rigidly it
defended conservative values. This was a vicious circle that could not be broken.
However sympathetic Castlereagh might have been to Austria’s problems, he
was unable to induce Great Britain to address potential, as opposed to actual,
dangers. “When the Territorial Balance of Europe is disturbed,” avowed
Castlereagh, “She [Britain] can interfere with effect, but She is the last
Government in Europe which can be expected, or can venture to commit Herself
on any question of an abstract character… We shall be found in our Place when
actual danger menaces the System of Europe; but this Country cannot, and will
not, act upon abstract and speculative Principles of Precaution.”17 Yet the crux of
Metternich’s problem was that necessity obliged him to treat as practical what
Great Britain considered abstract and speculative. Domestic upheaval happened
to be the danger Austria found the least manageable.
To soften the disagreement in principle, Castlereagh proposed periodic
meetings, or congresses, of the foreign ministers to review the European state of
affairs. What became known as the Congress system sought to forge a consensus
on the issues confronting Europe and to pave the way for dealing with them on a
multilateral basis. Great Britain, however, was not comfortable with a system of
European government, because it came too close to the unified Europe that the
British had consistently opposed. Traditional British policy apart, no British
government had ever undertaken a permanent commitment to review events as
they arose without confronting a specific threat. Participating in a European
government was no more attractive to British public opinion than the League of
Nations would be to Americans a hundred years later, and for much the same
reasons.
The British Cabinet made its reserve quite evident as early as the first such
conference, the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818. Castlereagh was
dispatched with these extraordinarily grudging instructions: “We approve [a
general declaration] on this occasion, and with difficulty too, by assuring [the
secondary powers] that… periodic meetings… are to be confined to one…
subject, or even… to one power, France, and no engagement to interfere in any
manner in which the Law of Nations does not justify interference…. Our true
policy has always been not to interfere except in great emergencies and then with
commanding force.”18 Great Britain wanted France kept in check but, beyond
that, the twin fears of “continental entanglements” and a unified Europe
prevailed in London.
There was only one occasion when Great Britain found Congress diplomacy
compatible with its objectives. During the Greek Revolution of 1821, England
interpreted the Tsar’s desire to protect the Christian population of the collapsing
Ottoman Empire as the first stage of Russia’s attempt to conquer Egypt. With
British strategic interests at stake, Castlereagh did not hesitate to appeal to the
Tsar in the name of the very allied unity he had heretofore sought to restrict to
containing France. Characteristically, he elaborated a distinction between
theoretical and practical issues: “The question of Turkey is of a totally different
character and one which in England we regard not as a theoretical but a practical
consideration….”19
But Castlereagh’s appeal to the Alliance served above all to demonstrate its
inherent brittleness. An alliance in which one partner treats his own strategic
interests as the sole practical issue confers no additional security on its members.
For it provides no obligation beyond what considerations of national interest
would have impelled in any event. Metternich undoubtedly drew comfort from
Castlereagh’s obvious personal sympathy for his objectives, and even for the
Congress system itself. Castlereagh, it was said by one of Austria’s diplomats,
was “like a great lover of music who is at Church; he wishes to applaud but he
dare not.”20 But if even the most European-minded of British statesmen dared
not applaud what he believed in, Great Britain’s role in the Concert of Europe
was destined to be transitory and ineffective.
Somewhat like Wilson and his League of Nations a century later,
Castlereagh’s efforts to persuade Great Britain to participate in a system of
European congresses went far beyond what English representative institutions
could tolerate on either philosophical or strategic grounds. Castlereagh was
convinced, as Wilson would be, that the danger of new aggression could best be
avoided if his country joined some permanent European forum that dealt with
threats before they developed into crises. He understood Europe better than most
of his British contemporaries and knew that the newly created balance would
require careful tending. He thought that he had devised a solution Great Britain
could support, because it did not go beyond a series of discussion meetings of
the foreign ministers of the four victors and had no obligatory features.
But even discussion meetings smacked too much of European government for
the British Cabinet. Indeed, the Congress system never even cleared its initial
hurdle. When Castlereagh attended the first conference at Aix-la-Chapelle in
1818, France was admitted to the Congress system and Great Britain made its
exit from it. The Cabinet refused to let Castlereagh attend any further European
congresses, which subsequently took place at Troppau in 1820, at Laibach in
1821, and at Verona in 1822. Great Britain remained aloof from the Congress
system, which its own Foreign Secretary had devised, just as, a century later, the
United States would distance itself from the League of Nations, which its
president had proposed. In each case, the attempt by the leader of the most
powerful country to create a general system of collective security failed because
of domestic inhibitions and historic traditions.
Both Wilson and Castlereagh believed that the international order established
after a catastrophic war could only be protected by the active participation of all
of the key members of the international community and especially of their own
countries. To Castlereagh and Wilson, security was collective; if any nation was
victimized, in the end all would become victims. With security thus perceived as
seamless, all states had a common interest in resisting aggression, and an even
greater interest in preventing it. In Castlereagh’s view, Great Britain, whatever
its views on specific issues, had a genuine interest in the preservation of general
peace and in the maintenance of the balance of power. Like Wilson, Castlereagh
thought that the best way to defend that interest was to have a hand in shaping
the decisions affecting international order and in organizing resistance to
violations of the peace.
The weakness of collective security is that interests are rarely uniform, and
that security is rarely seamless. Members of a general system of collective
security are therefore more likely to agree on inaction than on joint action; they
either will be held together by glittering generalities, or may witness the
defection of the most powerful member, who feels the most secure and therefore
least needs the system. Neither Wilson nor Castlereagh was able to bring his
country into a system of collective security because their respective societies did
not feel threatened by foreseeable dangers and thought that they could deal with
them alone or, if need be, find allies at the last moment. To them, participating in
the League of Nations or the European Congress system compounded risks
without enhancing security.
There was one huge difference between the two Anglo-Saxon statesmen,
however. Castlereagh was out of tune not only with his contemporaries but with
the entire thrust of modern British foreign policy. He left no legacy; no British
statesman has used Castlereagh as a model. Wilson not only responded to the
wellsprings of American motivation, but took it to a new and higher level. All
his successors have been Wilsonian to some degree, and subsequent American
foreign policy has been shaped by his maxims.
Lord Stewart, the British “observer” permitted to attend the various European
congresses, who was Castlereagh’s half-brother, spent most of his energy
defining the limits of Great Britain’s involvement rather than contributing to a
European consensus. At Troppau, he submitted a memorandum which affirmed
the right to self-defense but insisted that Great Britain would “not charge itself as
a member of the Alliance with the moral responsibility of administering a
general European Police.”21 At the Congress of Laibach, Lord Stewart was
obliged to reiterate that Great Britain would never engage itself against
“speculative” dangers. Castlereagh himself had set forth the British position in a
state paper of May 5, 1820. The Quadruple Alliance, he affirmed, was an
alliance for the “liberation of a great proportion of the Continent of Europe from
the military dominion of France—It never was, however, intended as an Union
for the Government of the World or for the Superintendence of the Internal
Affairs of other States.”22
In the end, Castlereagh found himself trapped between his convictions and his
domestic necessities. From this untenable situation, he could see no exit. “Sir,”
Castlereagh said at his last interview with the King, “it is necessary to say
goodbye to Europe; you and I alone know it and have saved it; no one after me
understands the affairs of the Continent.”23 Four days later, he committed
suicide.
As Austria grew more and more dependent on Russia, Metternich’s most
perplexing question became how long his appeals to the Tsar’s conservative
principles could restrain Russia from exploiting its opportunities in the Balkans
and at the periphery of Europe. The answer turned out to be nearly three
decades, during which time Metternich dealt with revolutions in Naples, Spain,
and Greece while effectively maintaining a European consensus and avoiding
Russian intervention in the Balkans.
But the Eastern Question would not go away. In essence, it was the result of
independence struggles in the Balkans as the various nationalities tried to break
loose of Turkish rule. The quandary this posed for the Metternich system was
that it clashed with that system’s commitment to maintaining the status quo, and
that the independence movements which today were aimed at Turkey would
tomorrow attack Austria. Moreover, the Tsar, who was the most committed to
legitimacy, was also the most eager to intervene, but nobody—certainly not in
London or Vienna—believed that the Tsar would preserve the status quo after
his armies had been launched.
For a time, a mutual interest in cushioning the shock of the collapsing
Ottoman Empire sustained a warm relationship with Great Britain and Austria.
However little the English cared about particular Balkan issues, a Russian
advance toward the Straits was perceived as a threat to British interests in the
Mediterranean, and encountered tenacious resistance. Metternich never
participated directly in these British efforts to oppose Russian expansionism,
much as he welcomed them. His careful and, above all, anonymous diplomacy—
affirming Europe’s unity, flattering the Russians, and cajoling the British—
enabled Austria to preserve its Russian option while other states bore the brunt
of thwarting Russian expansionism.
Metternich’s removal from the scene in 1848 marked the beginning of the end
of the high-wire act by which Austria had used the unity of conservative
interests to maintain the Vienna settlement. To be sure, legitimacy could not
have compensated indefinitely for the steady decline in Austria’s geopolitical
position or for the growing incompatibility between its domestic institutions and
dominant national tendencies. But nuance is the essence of statesmanship.
Metternich had finessed the Eastern Question but his successors, unable to adapt
Austria’s domestic institutions to the times, tried to compensate by bringing
Austrian diplomacy into line with the emerging trend of power politics,
unrestrained by a concept of legitimacy. It was to be the undoing of the
international order.
So it happened that the Concert of Europe was ultimately shattered on the
anvil of the Eastern Question. In 1854, the Great Powers were at war for the first
time since the days of Napoleon. Ironically, this war, the Crimean War, long
condemned by historians as a senseless and utterly avoidable affair, was
precipitated not by Russia, Great Britain, or Austria—countries with vast
interests in the Eastern Question—but by France.
In 1852, the French Emperor Napoleon III, having just come to power by a
coup, persuaded the Turkish Sultan to grant him the sobriquet of Protector of the
Christians in the Ottoman Empire, a role the Russian Tsar traditionally reserved
for himself. Nicholas I was enraged that Napoleon, whom he considered an
illegitimate upstart, should presume to step into Russia’s shoes as protector of
Balkan Slavs, and demanded equal status with France. When the Sultan rebuffed
the Russian emissary, Russia broke off diplomatic relations. Lord Palmerston,
who shaped British foreign policy during the mid-nineteenth century, was
morbidly suspicious of Russia and urged the dispatch of the Royal Navy to
Besika Bay, just outside the Dardanelles. The Tsar still continued in the spirit of
the Metternich system: “The four of you,” he said, referring to the other Great
Powers, “could dictate to me, but this will never happen. I can count on Berlin
and Vienna.”24 To show his lack of concern, Nicholas ordered the occupation of
the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia (present-day Romania).
Austria, which had the most to lose from a war, proposed the obvious solution
—that France and Russia act as joint protectors of the Ottoman Christians.
Palmerston was eager for neither outcome. To strengthen Great Britain’s
bargaining position, he sent the Royal Navy to the entrance of the Black Sea.
This encouraged Turkey to declare war on Russia. Great Britain and France
backed Turkey.
The real causes of the war were deeper, however. Religious claims were in
fact pretexts for political and strategic designs. Nicholas was pursuing the
ancient Russian dream of gaining Constantinople and the Straits. Napoleon III
saw an opportunity to end France’s isolation and to break up the Holy Alliance
by weakening Russia. Palmerston sought some pretext to end Russia’s drive
toward the Straits once and for all. With the outbreak of war, British warships
entered the Black Sea and began to destroy the Russian Black Sea fleet. An
Anglo-French force landed in the Crimea to seize the Russian naval base of
Sevastopol.
These events spelled nothing but complexity for Austria’s leaders. They
attached importance to the traditional friendship with Russia while fearing that
Russia’s advance in the Balkans might increase the restlessness of Austria’s
Slavic populations. But they feared that siding with their old friend Russia in the
Crimea would give France a pretext for attacking Austria’s Italian territories.
At first, Austria declared neutrality, which was the sensible course. But the
new Austrian Foreign Minister, Count Buol, found inactivity too nerve-racking
and the French threat to Austria’s possessions in Italy too unsettling. As the
British and French armies were besieging Sevastopol, Austria presented an
ultimatum to the Tsar, demanding that Russia retreat from Moldavia and
Wallachia. That was the decisive factor in ending the Crimean War—at least that
is what Russian leaders would think ever after.
Austria had jettisoned Nicholas I and a steadfast friendship with Russia dating
back to the Napoleonic Wars. Frivolity compounded by panic caused
Metternich’s successors to throw away the legacy of conservative unity that had
been accumulated so carefully and at times painfully for over a generation. For
once Austria cut itself loose from the shackles of shared values, it also freed
Russia to conduct its own policy strictly on the basis of geopolitical merit.
Pursuing such a course, Russia was bound to clash with Austria over the future
of the Balkans and, in time, to seek to undermine the Austrian Empire.
The reason the Vienna settlement had worked for fifty years was that the three
Eastern powers—Prussia, Russia, and Austria—had seen their unity as the
essential barrier to revolutionary chaos and to French domination of Europe. But
in the Crimean War, Austria (“the chamber of peers of Europe,” as Talleyrand
had called it) maneuvered itself into an uneasy alliance with Napoleon III, who
was eager to undermine Austria in Italy, and Great Britain, which was unwilling
to engage in European causes. Austria thereby liberated Russia and Prussia, its
acquisitive erstwhile partners in the Holy Alliance, to pursue their own undiluted
national interests. Prussia exacted its price by forcing Austria to withdraw from
Germany, while Russia’s growing hostility in the Balkans turned into one of the
triggers of the First World War and led to Austria’s ultimate collapse.
When faced with the realities of power politics, Austria had failed to realize
that its salvation had been the European commitment to legitimacy. The concept
of the unity of conservative interests had transcended national borders and thus
tended to mitigate the confrontations of power politics. Nationalism had the
opposite effect, exalting the national interest, heightening rivalries, and raising
the risks for everyone. Austria had thrown itself into a contest which, given all
its vulnerabilities, it could not possibly win.
Within five years of the end of the Crimean War, the Italian nationalist leader
Camillo Cavour began the process of expelling Austria from Italy by provoking
a war with Austria, backed by a French alliance and Russian acquiescence, both
of which would previously have seemed inconceivable. Within another five
years, Bismarck would defeat Austria in a war for predominance in Germany.
Once again, Russia stood aloof and France did the same, albeit reluctantly. In
Metternich’s day, the Concert of Europe would have consulted and controlled
these upheavals. Henceforth diplomacy would rely more on naked power than on
shared values. Peace was maintained for another fifty years. But with each
decade, tensions multiplied and arms races intensified.
Great Britain fared quite differently in an international system driven by
power politics. For one thing, it had never relied on the Congress system for its
security; for Great Britain, the new pattern of international relations was more
like business as usual. In the course of the nineteenth century, Great Britain
became the dominant country in Europe. To be sure, it was strong enough to
stand alone and had the advantages of geographic isolation and imperviousness
to domestic upheavals on the Continent. But it also had the benefit of steady
leaders pursuing an unsentimental commitment to the national interest.
Castlereagh’s successors did not understand the Continent nearly as well as he
had. But they had a surer grasp of what constituted the essential British national
interest, and they pursued it with extraordinary skill and persistence. George
Canning, Castlereagh’s immediate successor, lost no time in eliminating the last
few ties through which Castlereagh had maintained his influence, however
remote, on the European Congress system. In 1821, the year before he succeeded
Castlereagh, Canning had called for a policy of “neutrality in word and deed.”25
“Let us not,” he said, “in the foolish spirit of romance, suppose that we alone
could regenerate Europe.”26 Then, after becoming Foreign Secretary, he left no
doubt that his guiding principle was the national interest, which, in his view, was
incompatible with permanent engagement in Europe:
…intimately connected as we are with the system of Europe, it does not follow that we are therefore
called upon to mix ourselves on every occasion, with a restless and meddling activity, in the concerns
of the nations which surround us.27
In other words, Great Britain would reserve the right to steer its own course
according to the merits of each case and guided only by its national interest, a
policy which made allies either auxiliaries or irrelevant.
Palmerston explained the British definition of national interest as follows in
1856: “When people ask me… for what is called a policy, the only answer is that
we mean to do what may seem to be best, upon each occasion as it arises,
making the Interests of Our Country one’s guiding principle.”28 Half a century
later, the official description of British foreign policy had not gained much in the
way of precision, as reflected in this explanation by Foreign Secretary Sir
Edward Grey: “British Foreign Ministers have been guided by what seemed to
them to be the immediate interest of this country, without making elaborate
calculations for the future.”29
In most other countries, statements such as these would have been ridiculed as
tautological—we do what is best because we consider it best. In Great Britain,
they were considered illuminating; very rarely was there a call to define that
much-used phrase “national interest”: “We have no eternal allies and no
permanent enemies,” said Palmerston. Great Britain required no formal strategy
because its leaders understood the British interest so well and so viscerally that
they could act spontaneously on each situation as it arose, confident that their
public would follow. In the words of Palmerston: “Our interests are eternal, and
those interests it is our duty to follow.”30
British leaders were more likely to be clear about what they were not prepared
to defend than to identify a casus belli in advance. They were even more
reluctant to spell out positive aims, perhaps because they liked the status quo
well enough. Convinced that they would recognize the British national interest
when they saw it, British leaders felt no need to elaborate it in advance. They
preferred to await actual cases—a position impossible for the Continental
countries to adopt, because they were those actual cases.
The British view of security was not unlike the view of American
isolationists, in that Great Britain felt impervious to all but cataclysmic
upheavals. But America and Great Britain differed when it came to the
relationship between peace and domestic structure. British leaders did not in any
sense consider the spread of representative institutions as a key to peace in the
way their American counterparts generally did, nor did they feel concerned
about institutions different from their own.
Thus, in 1841, Palmerston spelled out for the British ambassador in St.
Petersburg what Great Britain would resist by force of arms, and why it would
not resist purely domestic changes:
One of the general principles which Her Majesty’s Government wish to observe as a guide for their
conduct in dealing with the relations between England and other States, is, that changes which
foreign Nations may chuse to make in their internal Constitution and form of Government, are to be
looked upon as matters with which England has no business to interfere by force of arms….
But an attempt of one Nation to seize and to appropriate to itself territory which belongs to
another Nation, is a different matter; because such an attempt leads to a derangement of the existing
Balance of Power, and by altering the relative strength of States, may tend to create danger to other
Powers; and such attempts therefore, the British Government holds itself at full liberty to resist….31
Without exception, British ministers were concerned above all with preserving
their country’s freedom of action. In 1841, Palmerston reiterated Great Britain’s
abhorrence of abstract cases:
…it is not usual for England to enter into engagements with reference to cases which have not
actually arisen, or which are not immediately in prospect….32
Nearly thirty years later, Gladstone brought up the same principle in a letter to
Queen Victoria:
England should keep entire in her own hands the means of estimating her own obligations upon the
various states of facts as they arise; she should not foreclose and narrow her own liberty of choice by
declarations made to other Powers, in their real or supposed interests, of which they would claim to
be at least joint interpreters….33
Insisting on freedom of action, British statesmen as a rule rejected all variations
on the theme of collective security. What later came to be called “splendid
isolation” reflected England’s conviction that it stood to lose more than it could
gain from alliances. So aloof an approach could be entertained only by a country
that was sufficiently strong to stand alone, that foresaw no dangers for which it
might need the assistance of allies, and that felt certain that any extremity
threatening it would threaten its potential allies even more. Great Britain’s role
as the nation that maintained the European equilibrium gave it all the options its
leaders either wanted or needed. This policy was sustainable because it strove
for no territorial gains in Europe; England could pick and choose the European
quarrels in which to intervene because its only European interest was
equilibrium (however voracious the British appetite for colonial acquisitions
overseas).
Nonetheless, Great Britain’s “splendid isolation” did not keep it from entering
into temporary arrangements with other countries to deal with special
circumstances. As a sea power without a large standing army, Great Britain
occasionally had to cooperate with a continental ally, which it always preferred
to choose as the need arose. On such occasions British leaders could show
themselves remarkably impervious to past animosities. In the course of
Belgium’s secession from Holland in 1830, Palmerston first threatened France
with war if it sought to dominate the new state, then, a few years later, offered to
ally with it to guarantee Belgium’s independence: “England alone cannot carry
her points on the Continent; she must have allies as instruments to work with.”34
Of course, Great Britain’s various ad hoc allies had objectives of their own,
which usually involved an extension of influence or territory in Europe. When
they went beyond what England considered appropriate, England switched sides
or organized new coalitions against erstwhile allies in defense of the equilibrium.
Its unsentimental persistence and self-centered determination earned Great
Britain the epithet “Perfidious Albion.” This type of diplomacy may not have
reflected a particularly elevated attitude, but it preserved the peace of Europe,
especially after the Metternich system began fraying at the edges.
The nineteenth century marked the apogee of British influence. Great Britain
was self-confident and had every right to be. It was the leading industrial nation
and the Royal Navy commanded the seas. In an age of domestic upheavals,
British internal politics were remarkably serene. When it came to the big issues
of the nineteenth century—intervention or nonintervention, defense of the status
quo or cooperating with change—British leaders refused to be bound by dogma.
In the war for Greek independence in the 1820s, Great Britain sympathized with
Greece’s independence from Ottoman rule as long as doing so did not threaten
its strategic position in the Eastern Mediterranean by increasing Russian
influence. But by 1840, Great Britain would intervene to contain Russia, thereby
supporting the status quo in the Ottoman Empire. In the Hungarian Revolution
of 1848, Great Britain, formally noninterventionist, in fact welcomed Russia’s
restoration of the status quo. When Italy revolted against Habsburg rule in the
1850s, Great Britain was sympathetic but noninterventionist. To defend the
balance of power, Great Britain was neither categorically interventionist nor
noninterventionist, neither a bulwark of the Viennese order nor a revisionist
power. Its style was relentlessly pragmatic, and the British people took pride in
their ability to muddle through.
Yet any pragmatic policy—indeed, especially a pragmatic policy—must be
based on some fixed principle in order to prevent tactical skill from dissipating
into a random thrashing about. And the fixed principle of British foreign policy,
whether acknowledged or not, was its role as protector of the balance of power,
which in general meant supporting the weaker against the stronger. By
Palmerston’s time, the balance of power had grown into such an immutable
principle of British policy that it needed no theoretical defense; whatever policy
was being pursued at any given moment became inevitably described in terms of
protecting the balance of power. Extraordinary flexibility was conjoined to a
number of fixed and practical objectives. For instance, the determination to keep
the Low Countries out of the hands of a major power did not change between the
time of William III and the outbreak of World War I. In 1870, Disraeli reaffirmed
that principle:
It had always been held by the Government of this country that it was for the interest of England that
the countries on the European Coast extending from Dunkirk and Ostend to the islands of the North
Sea should be possessed by free and flourishing communities, practicing the arts of peace, enjoying
the rights of liberty and following those pursuits of commerce which tend to the civilization of man,
and should not be in the possession of a great military Power….35
It was a measure of how isolated German leaders had become that they were
genuinely surprised when, in 1914, Great Britain reacted to the German invasion
of Belgium with a declaration of war.
Well into the nineteenth century, the preservation of Austria was considered an
important British objective. In the eighteenth century, Marlborough, Carteret,
and Pitt had fought several wars to prevent France from weakening Austria.
Though Austria had less to fear from French aggression in the nineteenth
century, the British still viewed Austria as a useful counterweight to Russian
expansion toward the Straits. When the Revolution of 1848 threatened to cause
the disintegration of Austria, Palmerston said:
Austria stands in the centre of Europe, a barrier against encroachment on the one side, and against
invasion on the other. The political independence and liberties of Europe are bound up, in my
opinion, with the maintenance and integrity of Austria as a great European Power; and therefore
anything which tends by direct, or even remote, contingency, to weaken and to cripple Austria, but
still more to reduce her from the position of a first-rate Power to that of a secondary State, must be a
great calamity to Europe, and one which every Englishman ought to deprecate, and to try to
prevent.36
After the Revolution of 1848, Austria became progressively weaker and its
policy increasingly erratic, diminishing its usefulness as a key element in British
policy in the Eastern Mediterranean.
The focus of England’s policy was to prevent Russia from occupying the
Dardanelles. Austro-Russian rivalries largely involved Russian designs on
Austria’s Slavic provinces, which did not seriously concern Great Britain, while
control of the Dardanelles was not a vital Austrian interest. Great Britain
therefore came to judge Austria an unsuitable counterweight to Russia. This was
why Great Britain stood by when Austria was defeated by Piedmont in Italy and
by Prussia in the contest over primacy in Germany—an indifference which
would not have been conceivable a generation before. After the turn of the
century, fear of Germany would dominate British policy, and Austria, Germany’s
ally, for the first time emerged as an opponent in British calculations.
In the nineteenth century, no one would have thought it possible that one day
Great Britain would be allied with Russia. In Palmerston’s view, Russia was
“pursuing a system of universal aggression on all sides, partly from the personal
character of the Emperor [Nicholas], partly from the permanent system of the
government.”37 Twenty-five years later, this view was echoed by Lord
Clarendon, who argued that the Crimean War was “a battle of civilization against
barbarism.”38 Great Britain spent the better part of the century attempting to
check Russian expansion into Persia and on the approaches to Constantinople
and India. It would take decades of German bellicosity and insensitivity to shift
the major British security concern to Germany, which did not finally occur until
after the turn of the century.
British governments changed more frequently than those of the socalled
Eastern Powers; none of Britain’s major political figures—Palmerston,
Gladstone, and Disraeli—enjoyed uninterrupted tenures, as did Metternich,
Nicholas I, and Bismarck. Still, Great Britain maintained an extraordinary
consistency of purpose. Once embarked on a particular course, it would pursue it
with unrelenting tenacity and dogged reliability, which enabled Great Britain to
exert a decisive influence on behalf of tranquillity in Europe.
One cause of Great Britain’s single-mindedness in times of crisis was the
representative nature of its political institutions. Since 1700, public opinion had
played an important role in British foreign policy. No other country in
eighteenth-century Europe had an “opposition” point of view with respect to
foreign policy; in Great Britain, it was inherent in the system. In the eighteenth
century, the Tories as a rule represented the King’s foreign policy, which leaned
toward intervention in Continental disputes; the Whigs, like Sir Robert Walpole,
preferred to retain a measure of aloofness from quarrels on the Continent and
sought greater emphasis on overseas expansion. By the nineteenth century, their
roles had been reversed. The Whigs, like Palmerston, represented an activist
policy, while the Tories, like Derby or Salisbury, were wary of foreign
entanglements. Radicals such as Richard Cobden were allied with the
Conservatives in advocating a noninterventionist British posture.
Because British foreign policy grew out of open debates, the British people
displayed extraordinary unity in times of war. On the other hand, so openly
partisan a foreign policy made it possible—though highly unusual—for foreign
policy to be reversed when a prime minister was replaced. For instance, Great
Britain’s support for Turkey in the 1870s ended abruptly when Gladstone, who
regarded the Turks as morally reprehensible, defeated Disraeli in the election of
1880.
At all times, Great Britain treated its representative institutions as unique unto
itself. Its policies on the Continent were always justified in terms of the British
national interest and not ideology. Whenever Great Britain expressed sympathy
for a revolution, as it did in Italy in 1848, it did so on eminently practical
grounds. Thus, Palmerston approvingly quoted Canning’s own pragmatic adage:
“That those who have checked improvement because it is innovation, will one
day or other be compelled to accept innovation when it has ceased to be
improvement.”39 But this was advice based on experience, not a call for the
dissemination of British values or institutions. Throughout the nineteenth
century, Great Britain judged other countries by their foreign policies and, but
for a brief Gladstonian interlude, remained indifferent to their domestic
structures.
Though Great Britain and America shared a certain aloofness from day-to-day
involvement in international affairs, Great Britain justified its own version of
isolationism on dramatically different grounds. America proclaimed its
democratic institutions as an example for the rest of the world; Great Britain
treated its parliamentary institutions as devoid of relevance to other societies.
America came to believe that the spread of democracy would ensure peace;
indeed, that a reliable peace could be achieved in no other way. Great Britain
might prefer a particular domestic structure but would run no risks on its behalf.
In 1848, Palmerston subordinated Great Britain’s historic misgivings about the
overthrow of the French monarchy and the emergence of a new Bonaparte by
invoking this practical rule of British statecraft: “The invariable principle on
which England acts is to acknowledge as the organ of every nation that organ
which each nation may deliberately choose to have.”40
Palmerston was the principal architect of Great Britain’s foreign policy for
nearly thirty years. In 1841, Metternich analyzed his pragmatic style with
cynical admiration:
…what does Lord Palmerston then want? He wants to make France feel the power of England, by
proving to her that the Egyptian affair will only finish as he may wish, and without France having
any right to take a hand. He wants to prove to the two German powers that he does not need them,
that Russia’s help suffices for England. He wants to keep Russia in check and drag her in his train by
her permanent anxiety of seeing England draw near to France again.41
It was not an inaccurate description of what Great Britain understood by the
balance of power. In the end, it enabled Great Britain to traverse the century with
only one relatively short war with another major power—the Crimean War.
Although it was far from anyone’s intent when the war started, it was, however,
precisely the Crimean War which led to the collapse of the Metternich order,
forged so painstakingly at the Congress of Vienna. The disintegration of unity
among the three Eastern monarchs removed the moral element of moderation
from European diplomacy. Fifteen years of turmoil followed before a new and
much more precarious stability emerged.
CHAPTER FIVE
Two Revolutionaries: Napoleon III and
Bismarck
The collapse of the Metternich system in the wake of the Crimean War
produced nearly two decades of conflict: the war of Piedmont and France against
Austria of 1859, the war over Schleswig-Holstein of 1864, the Austro-Prussian
War of 1866, and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Out of this turmoil, a new
balance of power emerged in Europe. France, which had participated in three of
the wars and encouraged the others, lost its position of predominance to
Germany. Even more importantly, the moral restraints of the Metternich system
disappeared. This upheaval became symbolized by the use of a new term for
unrestrained balance-of-power policy: the German word Realpolitik replaced the
French term raison d’état without, however, changing its meaning.
The new European order was the handiwork of two rather unlikely
collaborators who eventually became arch-adversaries—Emperor Napoleon III
and Otto von Bismarck. These two men ignored Metternich’s old pieties: that in
the interest of stability the legitimate crowned heads of the states of Europe had
to be preserved, that national and liberal movements had to be suppressed, and
that, above all, relations among states had to be determined by consensus among
like-minded rulers. They based their policy on Realpolitik—the notion that
relations among states are determined by raw power and that the mighty will
prevail.
The nephew of the great Bonaparte who had ravaged Europe, Napoleon III
had been in his youth a member of Italian secret societies fighting against
Austrian dominance in Italy. Elected President in 1848, Napoleon, as a result of
a coup, had himself declared Emperor in 1852. Otto von Bismarck was the scion
of an eminent Prussian family and a passionate opponent of the liberal
Revolution of 1848 in Prussia. Bismarck became Ministerpräsident (Prime
Minister) in 1862 only because the reluctant King saw no other recourse to
overcome a deadlock with a fractious Parliament over military appropriations.
Between them, Napoleon III and Bismarck managed to overturn the Vienna
settlement, most significantly the sense of self-restraint which emanated from a
shared belief in conservative values. No two more disparate personalities than
Bismarck and Napoleon III could be imagined. The Iron Chancellor and the
Sphinx of the Tuileries were united in their aversion to the Vienna system. Both
felt that the order established by Metternich at Vienna in 1815 was an albatross.
Napoleon III hated the Vienna system because it had been expressly designed to
contain France. Though Napoleon III did not have the megalomanic ambitions of
his uncle, this enigmatic leader felt that France was entitled to an occasional
territorial gain and did not want a united Europe standing in his way. He
furthermore thought that nationalism and liberalism were values that the world
identified with France, and that the Vienna system, by repressing them, put a rein
on his ambitions. Bismarck resented Metternich’s handiwork because it locked
Prussia into being Austria’s junior partner in the German Confederation, and he
was convinced that the Confederation preserved so many tiny German
sovereigns that it shackled Prussia. If Prussia were going to realize its destiny
and unify Germany, the Vienna system had to be destroyed.
While sharing a mutual disdain for the established order, the two
revolutionaries ended up at diametrically opposite poles in terms of their
achievements. Napoleon brought about the reverse of what he set out to
accomplish. Fancying himself the destroyer of the Vienna settlement and the
inspiration of European nationalism, he threw European diplomacy into a state
of turmoil from which France gained nothing in the long run and other nations
benefited. Napoleon made possible the unification of Italy and unintentionally
abetted the unification of Germany, two events which weakened France
geopolitically and destroyed the historical basis for the dominant French
influence in Central Europe. Thwarting either event would have been beyond
France’s capabilities, yet Napoleon’s erratic policy did much to accelerate the
process while simultaneously dissipating France’s capacity to shape the new
international order according to its long-term interests. Napoleon tried to wreck
the Vienna system because he thought it isolated France—which to some extent
was true—yet by the time his rule had ended in 1870, France was more isolated
than it had been during the Metternich period.
Bismarck’s legacy was quite the opposite. Few statesmen have so altered the
course of history. Before Bismarck took office, German unity was expected to
occur through the kind of parliamentary, constitutional government which had
been the thrust of the Revolution of 1848. Five years later, Bismarck was well on
his way to solving the problem of German unification, which had confounded
three generations of Germans, but he did so on the basis of the preeminence of
Prussian power, not through a process of democratic constitutionalism.
Bismarck’s solution had never been advocated by any significant constituency.
Too democratic for conservatives, too authoritarian for liberals, too poweroriented for legitimists, the new Germany was tailored to a genius who proposed
to direct the forces he had unleashed, both foreign and domestic, by
manipulating their antagonisms—a task he mastered but which proved beyond
the capacity of his successors.
During his lifetime, Napoleon III was called the “Sphinx of the Tuileries”
because he was believed to be hatching vast and brilliant designs, the nature of
which no one could discern until they gradually unfolded. He was deemed to be
enigmatically clever for having ended France’s diplomatic isolation under the
Vienna system and for having triggered the disintegration of the Holy Alliance
by means of the Crimean War. Only one European leader, Otto von Bismarck,
saw through him from the beginning. In the 1850s, his sardonic description of
Napoleon had been: “His intelligence is overrated at the expense of his
sentimentality.”
Like his uncle, Napoleon III was obsessed by his lack of legitimate
credentials. Though he considered himself a revolutionary, he yearned to be
accepted by the legitimate kings of Europe. Of course, had the Holy Alliance
still had its original convictions, it would have tried to overthrow the republican
institutions which had replaced French royal rule in 1848. The bloody excesses
of the French Revolution were still within living memory but so, too, was the
fact that foreign intervention in France had unleashed French revolutionary
armies on the nations of Europe in 1792. At the same time, an identical fear of
foreign intervention had made republican France loath to export her revolution.
Out of this stalemate of inhibitions, the conservative powers reluctantly brought
themselves to recognize republican France, which was ruled first by the poet and
statesman Alphonse de Lamartine, then by Napoleon as elected President, and,
finally, by Napoleon “III” as Emperor, in 1852, after his coup the previous
December to overturn the constitutional prohibition against his re-election.
No sooner had Napoleon III proclaimed the Second Empire than the question
of recognition arose again. This time it concerned whether to recognize
Napoleon as Emperor, since the Vienna settlement had specifically proscribed
the Bonaparte family from the French throne. Austria was the first to accept
what could not be changed. The Austrian Ambassador to Paris, Baron Hübner,
reported a characteristically cynical comment from his chief, Prince
Schwarzenberg, dated December 31, 1851, that underlined the end of the
Metternich era: “ ‘The days of principles are gone.’ ”1
Napoleon’s next big worry was whether the other monarchs would address
him with the appellation “brother,” which they used toward each other, or some
lesser form of address. In the end, the Austrian and Prussian monarchs yielded to
Napoleon’s preference, though Tsar Nicholas I remained adamant, refusing to go
beyond the address of “friend.” Given the Tsar’s views of revolutionaries, he no
doubt felt he had already rewarded Napoleon beyond his due. Hübner recorded
the injured feelings in the Tuileries:
One has the feeling of being snubbed by the old continental courts. This is the worm that eats at the
heart of Emperor Napoleon.2
Whether these snubs were real or imagined, they revealed the gulf between
Napoleon and the other European monarchs, which was one of the psychological
roots of Napoleon’s reckless and relentless assault on European diplomacy.
The irony of Napoleon’s life was that he was much better suited for domestic
policy, which basically bored him, than he was for foreign adventures, for which
he lacked both the daring and the insight. Whenever he took a breather from his
self-appointed revolutionary mission, Napoleon made major contributions to
France’s development. He brought the Industrial Revolution to France. His
encouragement of large credit institutions played a crucial role in France’s
economic development. And he rebuilt Paris into its grandiose modern
appearance. In the early nineteenth century, Paris was still a medieval city with
narrow, winding streets. Napoleon provided his close adviser, Baron Haussmann,
with the authority and the budget to create the modern city of broad boulevards,
great public buildings, and sweeping vistas. That one purpose of the broad
avenues was to provide a clear field of fire to discourage revolutions does not
detract from the magnificence and the permanence of the achievement.
But foreign policy was Napoleon’s passion, and there he found himself torn
by conflicting emotions. On the one hand, he realized he would never be able to
fulfill his quest for legitimacy, because a monarch’s legitimacy is a birthright that
cannot be conferred. On the other hand, he did not really want to go down in
history as a legitimist. He had been an Italian Carbonari (independence fighter),
and considered himself a defender of national self-determination. At the same
time, he was averse to running great risks. Napoleon’s ultimate goal was to
abrogate the territorial clauses of the Vienna settlement and to alter the state
system on which it had been based. But he never understood that achieving his
goal would also result in a unified Germany, which would forever end French
aspirations to dominate Central Europe.
The erratic nature of his policy was therefore a reflection of his personal
ambivalence. Distrustful of his “brother” monarchs, Napoleon was driven to
dependence on public opinion, and his policy fluctuated with his assessment of
what was needed to sustain his popularity. In 1857, the ubiquitous Baron Hübner
wrote to the Austrian Emperor:
In his [Napoleon’s] eyes foreign policy is only an instrument he uses to secure his rule in France, to
legitimize his throne, to found his dynasty…. [H]e would not shrink from any means, from any
combination which suited itself to making him popular at home.3
In the process, Napoleon made himself the prisoner of crises he had himself
engineered, because he lacked the inner compass to keep him on course. Time
and again, he would encourage a crisis—now in Italy, now in Poland, later in
Germany—only to recoil before its ultimate consequences. He possessed his
uncle’s ambition but not his nerve, genius, or, for that matter, raw power. He
supported Italian nationalism as long as it was confined to Northern Italy, and
advocated Polish independence as long as it involved no risk of war. As for
Germany, he simply did not know on which side to place his bet. Having
expected a protracted struggle between Austria and Prussia, Napoleon made
himself ridiculous by asking Prussia, the victor, to compensate him after the
event for his own inability to discern the winner.
What most suited Napoleon’s style was a European Congress to redraw the
map of Europe, for there he might shine at minimum risk. Nor did Napoleon
have any clear idea of just how he wanted the borders altered. In any event, no
other Great Power was willing to arrange such a forum to accommodate his
domestic needs. No nation agrees to redraw its borders—especially to its own
disadvantage—unless there is an overwhelming necessity to do so. As it turned
out, the only Congress at which Napoleon presided—the Congress of Paris,
which ended the Crimean War—did not redraw the map of Europe; it merely
ratified what had been achieved in the war. Russia was forbidden to maintain a
navy in the Black Sea and was thus deprived of a defensive capability against
another British assault. Russia was also forced to return Bessarabia and the
territory of Kars, on the eastern coast of the Black Sea, to Turkey. Additionally,
the Tsar was compelled to renounce his claim to be the Protector of the Ottoman
Christians, which had been the immediate cause of the war. The Congress of
Paris symbolized the splintering of the Holy Alliance, but no participant was
prepared to undertake the revision of the map of Europe.
Napoleon never succeeded in assembling another congress to redraw the map
of Europe, for one basic reason, which the British ambassador, Lord Clarendon,
pointed out to him: a country that seeks great changes and lacks the willingness
to run great risks dooms itself to futility.
I see that the idea of a European Congress is germinating in the Emperor’s mind, and with it the
arrondissement of the French frontier, the abolition of obsolete Treaties, and other remaniements as
may be necessary. I improvised a longish catalogue of dangers and difficulties that such a Congress
would entail, unless its decisions were unanimous, which was not probable, or one or two of the
strongest Powers were to go to war for what they wanted.4
Palmerston once summed up Napoleon’s statesmanship by saying: “…ideas
proliferated in his head like rabbits in a hutch.”5 The trouble was that these ideas
did not relate to any overriding concept. In the disarray of the collapsing
Metternich system, France had two strategic options. It could pursue the policy
of Richelieu and strive to keep Central Europe divided. This option would have
required Napoleon to subordinate his revolutionary convictions, at least within
Germany, in favor of the existing legitimate rulers, who were eager to maintain
the fragmentation of Central Europe. Or Napoleon could have put himself at the
head of a republican crusade, as his uncle had done, in the expectation that
France would thereby gain the gratitude of the nationalists and perhaps even the
political leadership of Europe.
Unfortunately for France, Napoleon pursued both strategies simultaneously.
An advocate of national self-determination, he seemed oblivious to the
geopolitical risk this position posed for France in Central Europe. He supported
the Polish Revolution but recoiled when confronted by its consequences. He
opposed the Vienna settlement as an affront to France without understanding
until it was too late that the Vienna world order was the best available security
guarantee for France as well.
For the German Confederation was designed to act as a unit only against an
overwhelming external danger. Its component states were explicitly forbidden to
join together for offensive purposes, and would never have been able to agree on
an offensive strategy—as was shown by the fact that the subject had never even
been broached in the half-century of the Confederation’s existence. France’s
Rhine frontier, inviolable so long as the Vienna settlement was intact, would not
prove to be secure for a century after the collapse of the Confederation, which
Napoleon’s policy made possible.
Napoleon never grasped this key element of French security. As late as the
outbreak of the Austro-Prussian War in 1866—the conflict which ended the
Confederation—he wrote to the Austrian Emperor:
I must confess that it was not without a certain satisfaction that I witnessed the dissolution of the
German Confederation organized mainly against France.6
The Habsburg responded far more perceptively: “…the German Confederation,
organized with purely defensive motives, had never, during the half-century of
its existence, given its neighbors cause for alarm.”7 The alternative to the
German Confederation was not Richelieu’s fragmented Central Europe but a
unified Germany with a population exceeding that of France and an industrial
capacity soon to overshadow it. By attacking the Vienna settlement, Napoleon
was transforming a defensive obstacle into a potential offensive threat to French
security.
A statesman’s test is whether he can discern from the swirl of tactical
decisions the true long-term interests of his country and devise an appropriate
strategy for achieving them. Napoleon could have basked in the acclaim given to
his clever tactics during the Crimean War (which were helped along by Austrian
shortsightedness), and in the increased diplomatic options now opening before
him. France’s interest would have been to stay close to Austria and Great
Britain, the two countries most likely to sustain the territorial settlement of
Central Europe.
The Emperor’s policy, however, was largely idiosyncratic and driven by his
mercurial nature. As a Bonaparte, he never felt comfortable cooperating with
Austria, whatever raison d’état might dictate. In 1858, Napoleon told a
Piedmontese diplomat: “Austria is a cabinet for whom I have always felt, and
still feel, the most lively repugnance.”8 His penchant for revolutionary projects
caused him to go to war with Austria over Italy in 1859. Napoleon alienated
Great Britain by annexing Savoy and Nice in the aftermath of the war as well as
by his repeated proposals for a European Congress to redraw the frontiers of
Europe. To complete his isolation, Napoleon sacrificed his option of allying
France with Russia by supporting the Polish Revolution in 1863. Having brought
European diplomacy to a state of flux under the banner of national selfdetermination, Napoleon now suddenly found himself alone when, out of the
turmoil he had done so much to cause, a German nation materialized to spell the
end of French primacy in Europe.
The Emperor made his first post-Crimea move in Italy in 1859, three years
after the Congress of Paris. Nobody had expected Napoleon to return to the
vocation of his youth in seeking to liberate Northern Italy from Austrian rule.
France would have had little to gain from such an adventure. If it succeeded, it
would create a state in a much stronger position to block the traditional French
invasion route; if it failed, the humiliation would be compounded by the
vagueness of the objective. And whether it succeeded or failed, French armies in
Italy would disquiet Europe.
For all these reasons, the British Ambassador, Lord Henry Cowley, was
convinced that a French war in Italy was beyond all probability. “It is not in his
interests to fight a war,” Hübner reported Cowley as saying. “The alliance with
England, although shaken for a moment, and still quite dormant, remains the
basis of Napoleon Ill’s policy.”9 Some three decades later, Hübner was to offer
these reflections:
We could scarcely comprehend that this man, having reached the pinnacle of honor, unless he was
mad, or afflicted with the madness of gamblers, seriously could consider, having no understandable
motive, joining in another adventure.10
Yet Napoleon surprised all the diplomats with the exception of his ultimate
nemesis, Bismarck, who had predicted a French war against Austria and indeed
hoped for it as a means of weakening Austria’s position in Germany.
In July 1858, Napoleon concluded a secret understanding with Camillo Benso
di Cavour, the Prime Minister of Piedmont (Sardinia), the strongest Italian state,
to cooperate in a war against Austria. It was a purely Machiavellian move in
which Cavour would unify Northern Italy and Napoleon would receive as his
reward Nice and Savoy from Piedmont. By May 1859, a suitable pretext had
been found. Austria, always short of steady nerves, permitted itself to be
provoked by Piedmontese harassment into declaring war. Napoleon let it be
known that this amounted to a declaration of war against France, and launched
his armies into Italy.
Oddly enough, in Napoleon’s time, when Frenchmen talked of the
consolidation of nation-states as the wave of the future, they thought primarily of
Italy and not of the much stronger Germany. The French had a sympathy and
cultural affinity for Italy that was lacking vis-à-vis their ominous Eastern
neighbor. In addition, the mighty economic boom which was to take Germany to
the forefront of the European Powers was only just beginning; hence it was not
yet obvious that Italy would be any less powerful than Germany. Prussia’s
cautiousness during the Crimean War strengthened Napoleon’s view that Prussia
was the weakest of the Great Powers and incapable of strong action without
Russian support. Thus, in Napoleon’s mind, an Italian war weakening Austria
would reduce the power of France’s most dangerous German opponent and
enhance France’s significance in Italy—an egregious misjudgment on both
counts.
Napoleon kept open two contradictory options. In the better case, Napoleon
could play European statesman: Northern Italy would throw off the Austrian
yoke, and the European Powers would gather at a congress under Napoleon’s
sponsorship and agree to the large-scale territorial revisions he had failed to
achieve at the Congress of Paris. In the worse case, the war would reach a
stalemate and Napoleon would play the Machiavellian manipulator of raison
d’état, gaining some advantage from Austria at Piedmont’s expense in return for
ending the war.
Napoleon pursued the two objectives simultaneously. French armies were
victorious at Magenta and Solferino but unleashed such a tide of anti-French
sentiment in Germany that, for a time, it appeared as if the smaller German
states, fearing a new Napoleonic onslaught, would force Prussia to intervene on
Austria’s side. Jolted by this first sign of German nationalism and shaken by his
visit to the battlefield at Solferino, Napoleon concluded an armistice with
Austria at Villafranca on July 11, 1859, without informing his Piedmontese
allies.
Not only had Napoleon failed to achieve either of his objectives, he had
seriously weakened his country’s position in the international arena. Henceforth,
the Italian nationalists would carry the principles he had espoused to lengths he
had never envisioned. Napoleon’s goal of establishing a medium-sized satellite
in an Italy divided into perhaps five states annoyed Piedmont, which was not
about to abandon its national vocation. Austria remained as adamant about
holding on to Venetia as Napoleon was about returning it to Italy, creating yet
another insoluble dispute involving no conceivable French interest. Great Britain
interpreted the annexation of Savoy and Nice as the beginning of another period
of Napoleonic conquests and refused all French initiatives for Napoleon’s
favorite obsession of holding a European congress. And all the while, German
nationalists saw in Europe’s turmoil a window of opportunity to advance their
own hopes for national unity.
Napoleon’s conduct during the Polish revolt of 1863 advanced his journey
into isolation. Reviving the Bonaparte tradition of friendship with Poland,
Napoleon first tried to convince Russia to make some concessions to its
rebellious subjects. But the Tsar would not even discuss such a proposal. Next,
Napoleon tried to organize a joint effort with Great Britain, but Palmerston was
too wary of the mercurial French Emperor. Finally, Napoleon turned to Austria
with the proposition that it give up its own Polish provinces to a not-yet-created
Polish state and Venetia to Italy, while seeking compensation in Silesia and the
Balkans. The idea held no obvious appeal for Austria, which was being asked to
risk war with Prussia and Russia for the privilege of seeing a French satellite
emerge on its borders.
Frivolity is a costly indulgence for a statesman, and its price must eventually
be paid. Actions geared to the mood of the moment and unrelated to any overall
strategy cannot be sustained indefinitely. Under Napoleon, France lost influence
over the internal arrangements of Germany, which had been the mainstay of
French policy since Richelieu. Whereas Richelieu had understood that a weak
Central Europe was the key to French security, Napoleon’s policy, driven by his
quest for publicity, concentrated on the periphery of Europe, the only place
where gains could be made at minimum risk. With the center of gravity of
European policy moving toward Germany, France found itself alone.
An ominous event occurred in 1864. For the first time since the Congress of
Vienna, Austria and Prussia jointly disrupted the tranquillity of Central Europe,
starting a war on behalf of a German cause against a non-German power. The
issue at hand was the future of the Elbe duchies of Schleswig and Holstein,
which were dynastically linked to the Danish crown but were also members of
the German Confederation. The death of the Danish ruler had produced such a
complex tangle of political, dynastic, and national issues that Palmerston was
prompted to quip that only three people had ever understood it: of these, one was
dead, the second was in a lunatic asylum, and he himself was the third but he had
forgotten it.
The substance of the dispute was far less important than the coalition of two
key German states waging war on tiny Denmark in order to force it to relinquish
two ancient German territories linked with the Danish crown. It proved that
Germany was capable of offensive action after all and that, should Confederation
machinery turn out to be too cumbersome, the two German superpowers might
simply ignore it.
According to the traditions of the Vienna system, at this point the Great
Powers should have assembled in Congress to restore an approximation of the
status quo ante. Yet Europe was now in disarray largely due to the actions of the
French Emperor. Russia was not prepared to antagonize the two countries which
had stood aside while it quelled the Polish revolt. Great Britain was uneasy about
the attack on Denmark but would need a Continental ally to intervene, and
France, its only feasible partner, inspired little confidence.
History, ideology, and raison d’état should have warned Napoleon that events
would soon develop a momentum of their own. Yet he wavered between
upholding the principles of traditional French foreign policy, which was
designed to keep Germany divided, and supporting the principle of nationality,
which had been the inspiration of his youth. French Foreign Minister Drouyn de
Lhuys wrote to La Tour d’Auvergne, the French Ambassador to London:
Placed between the rights of a country for which we have long sympathized, and the aspirations of
the German population, which we equally have to take into account, we have to act with a greater
degree of circumspection than does England.11
The responsibility of statesmen, however, is to resolve complexity rather than to
contemplate it. For leaders unable to choose among their alternatives,
circumspection becomes an alibi for inaction. Napoleon had become convinced
of the wisdom of inaction, enabling Prussia and Austria to settle the future of the
Elbe duchies. They detached Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark and occupied
them jointly while the rest of Europe stood by—a solution which would have
been unthinkable under the Metternich system. France’s nightmare of German
unity was approaching, something Napoleon had been dodging for a decade.
Bismarck was not about to share the leadership of Germany. He turned the
joint war for Schleswig-Holstein into another of Austria’s seemingly endless
series of blunders, which for a decade marked the progressive erosion of its
position as a Great Power. The reason these errors occurred was always the same
—Austria’s appeasing a self-proclaimed opponent by offering to cooperate with
it. The strategy of appeasement worked no better with Prussia than it had a
decade earlier, during the Crimean War, vis-ä-vis France. Far from buying
Austria’s release from Prussian pressures, the joint victory over Denmark
provided a new and highly disadvantageous forum for harassment. Austria was
now left to administer the Elbe duchies with a Prussian ally whose Prime
Minister, Bismarck, was determined to use the opportunity to bring about a longdesired showdown in a territory hundreds of miles from Austrian soil and
adjoining Prussia’s principal possessions.
As the tension mounted, Napoleon’s ambivalence came into sharper focus. He
dreaded German unification but was sympathetic to German nationalism and
dithered about solving that insoluble dilemma. He considered Prussia the most
genuinely national German state, writing in 1860 that:
Prussia personifies the German nationality, religious reform, commercial progress, liberal
constitutionalism. It is the largest of the truly German monarchies; it has more freedom of
conscience, more enlightenment, grants more political rights, than most other German states.12
Bismarck would have subscribed to every word. However, for Bismarck,
Napoleon’s affirmation of Prussia’s unique position was the key to Prussia’s
eventual triumph. In the end, Napoleon’s avowed admiration for Prussia
amounted to one more alibi for doing nothing. Rationalizing indecision as so
much clever maneuvering, Napoleon in fact encouraged an Austro-Prussian war,
partly because he was convinced that Prussia would lose. He told Alexandre
Walewski, his erstwhile Foreign Minister, in December 1865: “Believe me dear
friend, war between Austria and Prussia constitutes one of those unhoped-for
eventualities which can bring us more than one advantage.”13 Curiously, in the
course of Napoleon’s encouragement of the drift toward war, he never seemed to
have asked himself why Bismarck was so determined on war if Prussia was so
likely to be defeated.
Four months before the Austro-Prussian War started, Napoleon went beyond
the tacit to the explicit. In effect urging war, he told the Prussian Ambassador to
Paris, Count von der Goltz, in February 1866:
I ask you to tell the King [of Prussia] that he can always count on my amity. In case of a conflict
between Prussia and Austria, I will maintain the most absolute neutrality. I desire the reunion of the
Duchies [Schleswig-Holstein] with Prussia…. Should the struggle take on dimensions that one can’t
yet foresee, I am convinced that I could always reach an understanding with Prussia, whose interests
in a great number of questions are identical with those of France, while I see no turf on which I could
agree with Austria.14
What did Napoleon really want? Was he convinced of the likelihood of a
stalemate that would enhance his bargaining position? He was clearly hoping for
some Prussian concessions in exchange for his neutrality. Bismarck understood
this game. If Napoleon remained neutral, he offered to take a benevolent attitude
to French seizure of Belgium, which would have had the additional benefit of
embroiling France with Great Britain. Napoleon probably did not take this offer
too seriously since he expected Prussia to lose; his moves were designed more to
keep Prussia on its course to war than to bargain for benefits. Some years later,
Count Armand, the French Foreign Minister’s top assistant, admitted:
The only worry that we had at the Foreign Office was that Prussia would be crushed and humiliated
to too great an extent, and we were determined to prevent this through timely intervention. The
Emperor wanted to let Prussia be defeated, then to intervene and to construct Germany according to
his fantasies.15
What Napoleon had in mind was an updating of Richelieu’s machinations.
Prussia was expected to offer France compensation in the West for extrication
from its defeat, Venetia would be given to Italy, and a new German arrangement
would result in the creation of a North German Confederation under Prussian
auspices and a South German grouping supported by France and Austria. The
only thing wrong with this scheme was that, whereas the Cardinal knew how to
judge the relation of forces and was willing to fight for his judgments, Napoleon
was prepared to do neither.
Napoleon procrastinated, hoping for a turn of events that would present him
with his deepest desires at no risk. The device he used was his standard ploy of
calling for a European congress to avert the threat of war. The reaction by now
was equally standard. The other powers, fearful of Napoleon’s designs, refused
to attend. Wherever he turned, his dilemma awaited him: he could defend the
status quo by abandoning his support of the nationality principle; or he could
encourage revisionism and nationalism and in the process jeopardize the national
interests of France as they had been historically conceived. Napoleon sought
refuge in hinting to Prussia about “compensations” without specifying what they
were, which convinced Bismarck that French neutrality was a question of price,
not principle. Goltz wrote to Bismarck:
The only difficulty that the Emperor finds in a common stand of Prussia, France and Italy in a
congress is the lack of a compensation to be offered to France. One knows what we want; one knows
what Italy wants; but the Emperor can’t say what France wants, and we can’t offer him any
suggestion in this regard.16
Great Britain made its attendance at the Congress dependent on a prior French
agreement to the status quo. Instead of seizing upon this consecration of the
German arrangements which owed so much to French leadership and to which
France owed its security, Napoleon backed off, insisting that, “to maintain the
peace, it is necessary to take into account the national passions and
requirements.”17 In short, Napoleon was willing to risk an Austro-Prussian war
and a unified Germany in order to gain vague spoils in Italy, which affected no
real French national interests, and for gains in Western Europe, which he was
reluctant to specify. But in Bismarck he was up against a master who insisted on
the power of realities, and who exploited for his own ends the cosmetic
maneuvers at which Napoleon excelled.
There were French leaders who understood the risks Napoleon was running,
and who realized that the socalled compensation he was aiming for involved no
basic French interest. In a brilliant speech on May 3, 1866, Adolphe Thiers, a
staunch republican opponent of Napoleon and later President of France,
predicted correctly that Prussia was likely to emerge as the dominant force in
Germany:
One will see a return of the Empire of Charles V, which formerly resided in Vienna, and now will
reside in Berlin which will be close to our border, and will apply pressure to it—You have a right to
resist this policy in the name of the interest of France, for France is too important for such a
revolution not to menace her gravely. And when she had struggled for two centuries… to destroy this
colossus, is she prepared to watch as it reestablishes itself before her eyes?!18
Thiers argued that, in place of Napoleon’s vague musings, France should adopt a
clear policy of opposition to Prussia and invoke as a pretext the defense of the
independence of the German states—the old Richelieu formula. France, he
claimed, had the right to resist German unification “first in the name of the
independence of the German states… second, in the name of her own
independence, and, finally in the name of the European balance, which is the
interest of all, the interest of universal society…. Today one tries to heap ridicule
on the term ‘European balance’… but, what is the European balance? It is the
independence of Europe.”19
It was nearly too late to head off the war between Prussia and Austria that
would irrevocably alter the European balance. Analytically, Thiers was correct
but the premises for such a policy ought to have been established a decade
earlier. Even now, Bismarck might have been brought up short if France had
issued a strong warning that it would not permit Austria to be defeated or
traditional principalities like the Kingdom of Hanover to be destroyed. But
Napoleon rejected such a course because he expected Austria to win, and
because he seemed to prize undoing the Vienna settlement and fulfilling the
Bonaparte tradition above any analysis of historic French national interests. He
replied to Thiers three days later: “I detest those treaties of 1815 which
nowadays people want to make the sole basis of our policy.”20
Little more than a month after Thiers’s speech, Prussia and Austria were at
war. Against all Napoleon’s expectations, Prussia won decisively and quickly.
By the rules of Richelieu’s diplomacy, Napoleon should have assisted the loser
and prevented a clearcut Prussian victory. But, though he moved an army corps
of “observation” to the Rhine, he dithered. Bismarck threw Napoleon the sop of
letting him mediate the peace, though this empty gesture could not obscure
France’s growing irrelevance to German arrangements. At the Treaty of Prague
of August 1866, Austria was forced to withdraw from Germany. Two states,
Hanover and Hesse-Cassel, which had sided with Austria during the war, were
annexed by Prussia along with Schleswig-Holstein and the free city of Frankfurt.
By deposing their rulers, Bismarck made it clear that Prussia, once a linchpin of
the Holy Alliance, had abandoned legitimacy as the guiding principle of the
international order.
The North German states which retained their independence were
incorporated into Bismarck’s new creation, the North German Confederation,
subject to Prussian leadership in everything from trade legislation to foreign
policy. The South German states of Bavaria, Baden, and Württemberg were
allowed to retain their independence at the price of treaties with Prussia that
brought their armies under Prussian military leadership in the event of a war
with an outside power. The unification of Germany was now just one crisis
away.
Napoleon had maneuvered his country into a dead end from which extrication
proved impossible. Too late, he tried for an alliance with Austria, which he had
expelled from Italy by military action and from Germany by neutrality. But
Austria had lost interest in recovering either position, preferring to concentrate
first on rebuilding its empire as a dual monarchy based in Vienna and Budapest,
and then on its possessions in the Balkans. Great Britain was put off by France’s
designs on Luxembourg and Belgium; and Russia never forgave Napoleon his
conduct over Poland.
France was now obliged to tend to the collapse of its historic European
preeminence all by itself. The more hopeless its position, the more Napoleon
sought to recoup it by some brilliant move, like a gambler who doubles his bet
after each loss. Bismarck had encouraged Napoleon’s neutrality in the AustroPrussian War by dangling before him the prospect of territorial acquisitions—
first in Belgium, then in Luxembourg. These prospects vanished whenever
Napoleon tried to snatch them because Napoleon wanted his “compensation”
handed to him, and because Bismarck saw no reason to run risks when he had
already harvested the fruits of Napoleon’s indecisiveness.
Humiliated by these demonstrations of impotence, and above all by the
increasingly obvious tilt of the European balance against France, Napoleon
sought to compensate for his miscalculation that Austria would win the AustroPrussian War by making an issue of the succession to the Spanish throne, which
had become vacant. He demanded an assurance from the Prussian King that no
Hohenzollern prince (the Prussian dynasty) would seek the throne. It was
another empty gesture capable of producing at best a prestige success without
any relevance to the power relationships in Central Europe.
Nobody ever outmaneuvered Bismarck in a fluid diplomacy. In one of his
craftier moves, Bismarck used Napoleon’s posturing to lure him into declaring
war on Prussia in 1870. The French demand that the Prussian King renounce any
member of his family ever seeking the Spanish crown was indeed provocative.
But the stately old King William, rather than losing his temper, patiently and
correctly refused the French ambassador sent to secure the pledge. The King sent
his account of the affair to Bismarck, who edited his telegram—taking out any
language conveying the patience and propriety with which the King had in fact
treated the French ambassador.21 Bismarck, well ahead of his time, then resorted
to a technique which subsequent statesmen developed into an art form: he leaked
the socalled Ems Dispatch to the press. The edited version of the King’s
telegram looked like a royal snub of France. Outraged, the French public
demanded war, which Napoleon gave them.
Prussia won quickly and decisively with the assistance of all the other German
states. The road now lay clear for completing the unification of Germany,
proclaimed rather tactlessly by the Prussian leadership on January 18, 1871, in
the Hall of Mirrors of Versailles.
Napoleon had wrought the revolution which he had sought, though its
consequences were quite the opposite of what he had intended. The map of
Europe had indeed been redrawn, but the new arrangement had irreparably
weakened France’s influence without bringing Napoleon the renown he craved.
Napoleon had encouraged revolution without understanding its likely
outcome. Unable to assess the relationship of forces and to enlist it in fulfilling
his long-term goals, Napoleon failed this test. His foreign policy collapsed not
because he lacked ideas but because he was unable to establish any order among
his multitude of aspirations or any relationship between them and the reality
emerging all around him. Questing for publicity, Napoleon never had a single
line of policy to guide him. Instead, he was driven by a web of objectives, some
of them quite contradictory. When he confronted the crucial crisis of his career,
the various impulses canceled each other out.
Napoleon saw the Metternich system as humiliating to France and as a
constraint upon its ambitions. He was successful in disrupting the Holy Alliance
by driving a wedge between Austria and Russia during the Crimean War. But he
did not know what to do with his triumph. From 1853 to 1871 relative chaos
prevailed as the European order was reorganized. When this period ended,
Germany emerged as the strongest power on the Continent. Legitimacy—the
principle of the unity of conservative rulers that had mitigated the harshness of
the balance-of-power system during the Metternich years—turned into an empty
slogan. Napoleon himself had contributed to all these developments.
Overestimating France’s strength, he had encouraged every upheaval, convinced
that he could turn it to France’s benefit.
In the end, international politics came to be based on raw power. And in such
a world, there was an inherent gap between France’s image of itself as the
dominant nation of Europe and its capacity to live up to it—a gap that has
blighted French policy to this day. During Napoleon’s reign, this was evidenced
by the Emperor’s inability to implement his endless proposals for holding a
European congress to revise the map of Europe. Napoleon called for a congress
after the Crimean War in 1856, before the Italian War in 1859, during the Polish
revolt in 1863, during the Danish War in 1864, and before the Austro-Prussian
War in 1866—always seeking to gain at the conference table the revision of
frontiers which he never precisely defined and for which he was not prepared to
run the risk of war. Napoleon’s problem was that he was not strong enough to
insist, and that his schemes were too radical to command consensus.
France’s penchant for associating with countries ready to accept its leadership
has been a constant factor in French foreign policy since the Crimean War.
Unable to dominate an alliance with Great Britain, Germany, Russia, or the
United States, and considering junior status incompatible with its notions of
national grandeur and its messianic role in the world, France has sought
leadership in pacts with lesser powers—with Sardinia, Romania, and the middle
German states in the nineteenth century, with Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and
Romania in the interwar period.
The same attitude could be found in post-de Gaulle French foreign policy. A
century after the Franco-Prussian War, the problem of a more powerful Germany
remained France’s nightmare. France made the courageous choice of seeking
friendship with its feared and admired neighbor. Nevertheless, geopolitical logic
would have suggested that France seek close ties with the United States—if only
to increase its options. French pride, however, prevented this from happening,
leading France to search, sometimes quixotically, for a grouping—occasionally
almost any grouping—to balance the United States with a European consortium,
even at the price of eventual German preeminence. In the modern period, France
acted at times as a kind of parliamentary opposition to American leadership,
trying to build the European Community into an alternative world leader and
cultivating ties with nations it could dominate, or thought it could dominate.
Since the end of Napoleon Ill’s reign, France has lacked the power to impose
the universalist aspirations it inherited from the French Revolution, or the arena
to find an adequate outlet for its missionary zeal. For over a century, France has
been finding it difficult to accept the fact that the objective conditions for the
preeminence Richelieu had brought it disappeared once national consolidation
had been achieved in Europe. Much of the prickly style of its diplomacy has
been due to attempts by its leaders to perpetuate its role as the center of
European policy in an environment increasingly uncongenial to such aspirations.
It is ironic that the country that invented raison d’état should have had to occupy
itself, for the better part of a century, with trying to bring its aspirations in line
with its capabilities.
The destruction of the Vienna system, which Napoleon had begun, was
completed by Bismarck. Bismarck achieved political prominence as the
archconservative opponent of the liberal Revolution of 1848. He was also the
first leader to introduce universal male suffrage to Europe, along with the most
comprehensive system of social welfare the world would see for sixty years. In
1848, Bismarck strenuously fought the elected Parliament’s offer of the German
imperial crown to the Prussian King. But a little more than two decades later, he
himself would hand that imperial crown to a Prussian king at the end of the
process of unifying the German nation on the basis of opposition to liberal
principles, and of Prussia’s capacity to impose its will by force. This astonishing
achievement caused the international order to revert to the unrestrained contests
of the eighteenth century, now made all the more dangerous by industrial
technology and the capacity to mobilize vast national resources. No longer was
there talk of the unity of crowned heads or of harmony among the ancient states
of Europe. Under Bismarck’s Realpolitik, foreign policy became a contest of
strength.
Bismarck’s accomplishments were as unexpected as his personality. The man
of “blood and iron” wrote prose of extraordinary simplicity and beauty, loved
poetry, and copied pages of Byron in his diary. The statesman who extolled
Realpolitik possessed an extraordinary sense of proportion which turned power
into an instrument of self-restraint.
What is a revolutionary? If the answer to that question were without
ambiguity, few revolutionaries would ever succeed. For revolutionaries almost
always start from a position of inferior strength. They prevail because the
established order is unable to grasp its own vulnerability. This is especially true
when the revolutionary challenge emerges not with a march on the Bastille but in
conservative garb. Few institutions have defenses against those who evoke the
expectation that they will preserve them.
So it was with Otto von Bismarck. His life began during the flowering of the
Metternich system, in a world consisting of three major elements: the European
balance of power; an internal German equilibrium between Austria and Prussia;
and a system of alliances based on the unity of conservative values. For a
generation after the Vienna settlement, international tensions remained low
because all the major states perceived a stake in their mutual survival, and
because the socalled Eastern Courts of Prussia, Austria, and Russia were
committed to each other’s values.
Bismarck challenged each of these premises.22 He was convinced that Prussia
had become the strongest German state and did not need the Holy Alliance as a
link to Russia. In his view, shared national interests would supply an adequate
bond, and Prussian Realpolitik could substitute for conservative unity. Bismarck
considered Austria an obstacle to Prussia’s German mission, not a partner in it.
Contrary to the views of nearly all his contemporaries, except perhaps the
Piedmontese Prime Minister Cavour, Bismarck treated Napoleon’s restless
diplomacy as a strategic opportunity rather than as a threat.
When Bismarck delivered a speech in 1850 attacking the conventional
wisdom that German unity required the establishment of parliamentary
institutions, his conservative supporters at first did not realize that what they
were hearing was above all a challenge to the conservative premises of the
Metternich system.
Prussia’s honor does not consist in our playing all over Germany the Don Quixote for vexed
parliamentary celebrities, who consider their local constitution threatened. I seek Prussia’s honor in
keeping Prussia apart from any disgraceful connection with democracy and never admitting that
anything occur in Germany without Prussia’s permission….23
On the surface, Bismarck’s attack on liberalism was an application of the
Metternich philosophy. Yet it contained a decisive difference in emphasis. The
Metternich system had been based on the premise that Prussia and Austria
shared a commitment to conservative institutions and needed each other to
defeat liberal democratic trends. Bismarck was implying that Prussia could
impose its preferences unilaterally; that Prussia could be conservative at home
without tying itself to Austria or any other conservative state in foreign policy;
and that it needed no alliances to cope with domestic upheaval. In Bismarck, the
Habsburgs faced the same challenge with which Richelieu had presented them—
a policy divorced from any value system except the glory of the state. And, just
as with Richelieu, they did not know how to deal with it or even how to
comprehend its nature.
But how was Prussia to sustain Realpolitik all alone in the center of the
Continent? Since 1815, Prussia’s answer had been adherence to the Holy
Alliance at almost any price; Bismarck’s answer was the exact opposite—to
forge alliances and relationships in all directions, so that Prussia would always
be closer to each of the contending parties than they were to one another. In this
manner, a position of seeming isolation would enable Prussia to manipulate the
commitments of the other powers and to sell its support to the highest bidder.
In Bismarck’s view, Prussia would be in a strong position to implement such a
policy, because it had few foreign-policy interests other than enhancing its own
position within Germany. Every other power had more complicated
involvements: Great Britain had not only its empire but the overall balance of
power to worry about; Russia was simultaneously pressing into Eastern Europe,
Asia, and the Ottoman Empire; France had a newfound empire, ambitions in
Italy, and an adventure in Mexico on its hands; and Austria was preoccupied
with Italy and the Balkans, and with its leadership role in the German
Confederation. Because Prussia’s policy was so focused on Germany, it really
had no major disagreements with any other power except Austria, and at that
point the disagreement with Austria was primarily in Bismarck’s own mind.
Nonalignment, to use a modern term, was the functional equivalent of
Bismarck’s policy of selling Prussia’s cooperation in what he perceived to be a
seller’s market:
The present situation forces us not to commit ourselves in advance of the other powers. We are not
able to shape the relations of the Great Powers to each other as we wish, but we can maintain
freedom of action to utilize to our advantage those relationships which do come about…. Our
relations to Austria, Britain and Russia do not furnish an obstacle to a rapprochement with any of
these powers. Only our relations with France require careful attention so that we keep open the
option of going with France as easily as with the other powers….24
This hint of rapprochement with Bonaparte France implied a readiness to throw
ideology to the wind—in order to free Prussia to ally itself with any country
(whatever its domestic institutions) that could advance its interests. Bismarck’s
policy marked a return to the principles of Richelieu, who, though a Cardinal of
the Church, had opposed the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor when it was
required by the interests of France. Similarly, Bismarck, though conservative by
personal conviction, parted company with his conservative mentors whenever it
seemed that their legitimist principles would constrain Prussia’s freedom of
action.
This implicit disagreement came to a head when, in 1856, Bismarck, then
Prussian ambassador to the German Confederation, amplified his view that
Prussia be more forthcoming toward Napoleon III, who, in the eyes of Prussia’s
conservatives, was a usurper of the legitimate king’s prerogatives.
Putting Napoleon forward as a potential Prussian interlocutor went beyond
what Bismarck’s conservative constituency, which had launched and fostered his
diplomatic career, could tolerate. It greeted Bismarck’s emerging philosophy
with the same outraged disbelief among his erstwhile supporters that Richelieu
had encountered two centuries earlier when he had advanced the then
revolutionary thesis that raison d’état should have precedence over religion, and
the same which would in our time greet Richard Nixon’s policy of detente with
the Soviet Union. To conservatives, Napoleon III spelled the threat of a new
round of French expansionism and, even more importantly, symbolized a
reaffirmation of the hated principles of the French Revolution.
Bismarck did not dispute the conservative analysis of Napoleon any more than
Nixon challenged the conservative interpretation of communist motives.
Bismarck saw in the restless French ruler, as Nixon did in the decrepit Soviet
leadership (see chapter 28), both an opportunity and a danger. He considered
Prussia less vulnerable than Austria to either French expansionism or revolution.
Nor did Bismarck accept the prevailing opinion of Napoleon’s cunning, noting
sarcastically that the ability to admire others was not his most highly developed
trait. The more Austria feared Napoleon, the more it would have to make
concessions to Prussia, and the greater would become Prussia’s diplomatic
flexibility.
The reasons for Bismarck’s break with the Prussian conservatives were much
the same as those for Richelieu’s debate with his clerical critics, the chief
difference being that the Prussian conservatives insisted on universal political
principles, rather than universal religious principles. Bismarck asserted that
power supplied its own legitimacy; the conservatives argued that legitimacy
represented a value beyond calculations of power. Bismarck believed that a
correct evaluation of power implied a doctrine of self-limitation; the
conservatives insisted that only moral principles could ultimately limit the
claims of power.
The conflict evoked a poignant exchange of letters in the late 1850s between
Bismarck and his old mentor, Leopold von Gerlach, the Prussian King’s military
adjutant, to whom Bismarck owed everything—his first diplomatic appointment,
his access to the court, his entire career.
The exchange of letters between the two men began when Bismarck sent
Gerlach a recommendation that Prussia develop a diplomatic option toward
France along with a covering letter in which he placed utility above ideology:
I cannot escape the mathematical logic of the fact that present-day Austria cannot be our friend. As
long as Austria does not agree to a delimitation of spheres of influence in Germany, we must
anticipate a contest with it, by means of diplomacy and lies in peace time, with the utilization of
every opportunity to give a coup de grâce.25
Gerlach, however, could not bring himself to accept the proposition that strategic
advantage could justify abandoning principle, especially when it involved a
Bonaparte. He urged the Metternich remedy—that Prussia bring Austria and
Russia closer together and restore the Holy Alliance to enforce the isolation of
France.26
What Gerlach found even more incomprehensible was another Bismarck
proposal to the effect that Napoleon be invited to the maneuvers of a Prussian
army corps because “this proof of good relations with France… would increase
our influence in all diplomatic relations.”27
The suggestion that a Bonaparte participate in Prussian maneuvers provoked a
veritable outburst from Gerlach: “How can a man of your intelligence sacrifice
his principles to such an individual as Napoleon. Napoleon is our natural
enemy.”28 Had Gerlach seen Bismarck’s cynical marginalia—“What of it?”—he
might have saved himself the next letter, in which he reiterated his
antirevolutionary principles of a lifetime, the same that had led him to support
the Holy Alliance and to sponsor Bismarck’s early career:
My political principle is and remains the war against revolution. You will not convince Bonaparte
that he is not on the revolutionary side. And he will not stand on any other side because he clearly
derives advantage from this…. So if my principle of opposing revolution is right… it also has to be
adhered to in practice.29
Yet Bismarck disagreed with Gerlach not because he did not understand him, as
Gerlach supposed, but because he understood him only too well. Realpolitik for
Bismarck depended on flexibility and on the ability to exploit every available
option without the constraint of ideology. Just as Richelieu’s defenders had done,
Bismarck transferred the debate to the one principle he and Gerlach did share,
and one that would leave Gerlach at a distinct disadvantage—the overriding
importance of Prussian patriotism. Gerlach’s insistence on the unity of
conservative interests was, according to Bismarck, incompatible with loyalty to
their country:
France interests me only insofar as it affects the situation of my country and we can make policy only
with the France which exists…. As a romantic I can shed a tear for the fate of Henry V (the Bourbon
pretender); as a diplomat I would be his servant if I were French, but as things stand, France,
irrespective of the accident who leads it, is for me an unavoidable pawn on the chessboard of
diplomacy, where I have no other duty than to serve my king and my country [Bismarck’s emphasis].
I cannot reconcile personal sympathies and antipathies toward foreign powers with my sense of duty
in foreign affairs; indeed I see in them the embryo of disloyalty toward the Sovereign and the country
I serve.30
How was a traditional Prussian to respond to the proposition that Prussian
patriotism transcended the principle of legitimacy and that, if circumstances
should require it, a generation’s faith in the unity of conservative values could
verge on disloyalty? Bismarck implacably cut off every intellectual escape route,
rejecting in advance Gerlach’s argument that legitimacy was Prussia’s national
interest and that therefore Napoleon was Prussia’s permanent enemy:
…I could deny this—but even if you were right I would not consider it politically wise to let other
states know of our fears in peace time. Until the break you predict occurs I would think it useful to
encourage the belief… that the tension with France is not an organic fault of our nature….31
In other words, Realpolitik demanded tactical flexibility, and the Prussian
national interest required keeping open the option of making a deal with France.
The bargaining position of a country depends on the options it is perceived to
have. Closing them off eases the adversary’s calculations, and constricts those of
the practitioners of Realpolitik.
The break between Gerlach and Bismarck became irrevocable in 1860 over
the issue of Prussia’s attitude toward France’s war with Austria over Italy. To
Gerlach, the war had eliminated all doubt that Napoleon’s true purpose was to
set the stage for aggression in the style of the first Bonaparte. Gerlach therefore
urged Prussia to support Austria. Bismarck saw instead the opportunity—that if
Austria were forced to retreat from Italy, it could serve as the precursor of its
eventual expulsion from Germany as well. To Bismarck, the convictions of the
generation of Metternich had turned into a dangerous set of inhibitions:
I stand or fall with my own Sovereign, even if in my opinion he ruins himself stupidly, but for me
France will remain France, whether it is governed by Napoleon or by St. Louis and Austria is for me
a foreign country…. I know that you will reply that fact and right cannot be separated, that a properly
conceived Prussian policy requires chastity in foreign affairs even from the point of view of utility. I
am prepared to discuss the point of utility with you; but if you pose antinomies between right and
revolution; Christianity and infidelity; God and the devil; I can argue no longer and can merely say,
“I am not of your opinion and you judge in me what is not yours to judge.”32
This bitter declaration of faith was the functional equivalent of Richelieu’s
assertion that, since the soul is immortal, man must submit to the judgment of
God but that states, being mortal, can only be judged by what works. Like
Richelieu, Bismarck did not reject Gerlach’s moral views as personal articles of
faith—he probably shared most of them; but he denied their relevance to the
duties of statesmanship by way of elaborating the distinction between personal
belief and Realpolitik:
I did not seek the service of the King…. The God who unexpectedly placed me into it will probably
rather show me the way out than let my soul perish. I would overestimate the value of this life
strangely… should I not be convinced that after thirty years it will be irrelevant to me what political
successes I or my country have achieved in Europe. I can even think out the idea that some day
“unbelieving Jesuits” will rule over the Mark Brandenburg [core of Prussia] together with a
Bonapartist absolutism…. I am a child of different times than you, but as honest a one of mine as you
of yours.33
This eerie premonition of Prussia’s fate a century later never received an answer
from the man to whom Bismarck owed his career.
Bismarck was indeed the child of a different era from that of his erstwhile
mentor. Bismarck belonged to the age of Realpolitik; Gerlach had been shaped
by the period of Metternich. The Metternich system had reflected the eighteenthcentury conception of the universe as a great clockwork of intricately meshing
parts in which disruption of one part meant upsetting the interaction of the
others. Bismarck represented the new age in both science and politics. He
perceived the universe not as a mechanical balance, but in its modern version—
as consisting of particles in flux whose impact on each other creates what is
perceived as reality. Its kindred biological philosophy was Darwin’s theory of
evolution based on the survival of the fittest.
Driven by such convictions, Bismarck proclaimed the relativity of all belief,
including even the belief in the permanence of his own country. In the world of
Realpolitik, it was the statesman’s duty to evaluate ideas as forces in relation to
all the other forces relevant to making a decision; and the various elements
needed to be judged by how well they could serve the national interest, not by
preconceived ideologies.
Still, however hard-boiled Bismarck’s philosophy might have appeared, it was
built on an article of faith as unprovable as Gerlach’s premises—namely, that a
careful analysis of a given set of circumstances would necessarily lead all
statesmen to the same conclusions. Just as Gerlach found it inconceivable that
the principle of legitimacy could inspire more than one interpretation, it was
beyond Bismarck’s comprehension that statesmen might differ in the way they
assessed the national interest. Because of his magnificent grasp of the nuances of
power and its ramifications, Bismarck was able in his lifetime to replace the
philosophical constraints of the Metternich system with a policy of self-restraint.
Because these nuances were not as self-evident to Bismarck’s successors and
imitators, the literal application of Realpolitik led to their excessive dependence
on military power, and from there to an armament race and two world wars.
Success is often so elusive that statesmen pursuing it rarely bother to consider
that it may impose its own penalties. Thus, at the beginning of his career,
Bismarck was chiefly preoccupied with applying Realpolitik to destroying the
world he found, which was still very much dominated by Metternich’s
principles. This required weaning Prussia from the idea that Austrian leadership
in Germany was vital to Prussia’s security and to the preservation of
conservative values. However true this might have been at the time of the
Congress of Vienna, in the middle of the nineteenth century Prussia no longer
needed the Austrian alliance to preserve domestic stability or European
tranquillity. Indeed, according to Bismarck, the illusion of the need for an
Austrian alliance served above all to inhibit Prussia from pursuing its ultimate
goal of unifying Germany.
As Bismarck saw it, Prussian history was resplendent with evidence that
supported his claim of its primacy within Germany and of its ability to stand
alone. For Prussia was not just another German state. Whatever its conservative
domestic policies, they could not dim the national luster it had garnered through
its tremendous sacrifices in the wars of liberation from Napoleon. It was as if
Prussia’s very outlines—a series of oddly shaped enclaves stretching across the
North German plain from the Vistula to west of the Rhine—had destined it to
lead the quest for German unity, even in the eyes of the liberals.
But Bismarck went further. He challenged the conventional wisdom which
identified nationalism with liberalism, or at least with the proposition that
German unity could only be realized through liberal institutions:
Prussia has become great not through liberalism and free-thinking but through a succession of
powerful, decisive and wise regents who carefully husbanded the military and financial resources of
the state and kept them together in their own hands in order to throw them with ruthless courage into
the scale of European politics as soon as a favorable opportunity presented itself….34
Bismarck relied not on conservative principles but on the unique character of
Prussian institutions; he rested Prussia’s claim to leadership in Germany on its
strength rather than on universal values. In Bismarck’s view, Prussian
institutions were so impervious to outside influence that Prussia could exploit
the democratic currents of the period as instruments of foreign policy by
threatening to encourage greater freedom of expression at home—never mind
that no Prussian king had practiced such a policy for four decades, if ever:
The sense of security that the King remains master in his country even if the whole army is abroad is
not shared with Prussia by any other continental state and above all by no other German power. It
provides the opportunity to accept a development of public affairs much more in conformity with
present requirements…. The royal authority in Prussia is so firmly based that the government can
without risk encourage a much more lively parliamentary activity and thereby exert pressure on
conditions in Germany.35
Bismarck rejected the Metternich view that a shared sense of their domestic
vulnerability required the close association of the three Eastern Courts. Quite the
opposite was the case. Since Prussia was not threatened by domestic upheaval,
its very cohesiveness could serve as a weapon to undermine the Vienna
settlement by threatening the other powers, especially Austria, with policies
fomenting domestic upheavals. For Bismarck, the strength of Prussia’s
governmental, military, and financial institutions opened the road to Prussian
primacy in Germany.
When he was appointed ambassador to the Assembly of the Confederation in
1852 and ambassador to St. Petersburg in 1858, Bismarck ascended to positions
which enabled him to advocate his policies. His reports, brilliantly written and
remarkably consistent, urged a foreign policy based on neither sentiment nor
legitimacy but on the correct assessment of power. In this manner, Bismarck
returned to the tradition of such eighteenth-century rulers as Louis XIV and
Frederick the Great. Enhancing the influence of the state became the principal, if
not the only, objective, restrained solely by the forces massed against it:
…A sentimental policy knows no reciprocity. It is an exclusively Prussian peculiarity.36
…For heaven’s sake no sentimental alliances in which the consciousness of having performed a good
deed furnishes the sole reward for our sacrifice.37
…Policy is the art of the possible, the science of the relative.38
Not even the King has the right to subordinate the interests of the state to his personal sympathies or
antipathies.39
In Bismarck’s estimation, foreign policy had a nearly scientific basis, making it
possible to analyze the national interest in terms of objective criteria. In such a
calculation, Austria emerged as a foreign, not a fraternal, country, and above all
as an obstacle to Prussia’s rightful place in Germany: “Our policy has no other
parade ground than Germany and this is precisely the one which Austria believes
it badly requires for itself…. We deprive each other of the air we need to
breathe…. This is a fact which cannot be ignored however unwelcome it may
be.”40
The first Prussian king whom Bismarck served as ambassador, Frederick
William IV, was torn between Gerlach’s legitimist conservatism and the
opportunities inherent in Bismarck’s Realpolitik. Bismarck insisted that his
King’s personal regard for the traditionally preeminent German state must not
inhibit Prussian policy. Since Austria would never accept Prussian hegemony in
Germany, Bismarck’s strategy was to weaken Austria at every turn. In 1854,
during the Crimean War, Bismarck urged that Prussia exploit Austria’s break
with Russia and attack what was still Prussia’s partner in the Holy Alliance
without any better justification than the auspiciousness of the occasion:
Could we succeed in getting Vienna to the point where it does not consider an attack by Prussia on
Austria as something outside of all possibility we would soon hear more sensible things from
there….41
In 1859, during Austria’s war with France and Piedmont, Bismarck returned to
the same theme:
The present situation once more presents us with the great prize if we let the war between Austria
and France become well established and then move south with our army taking the border posts in
our field packs not to impale them again until we reach Lake Constance or at least the regions where
the Protestant confession ceases to predominate.42
Metternich would have considered this heresy, but Frederick the Great would
have applauded a disciple’s clever adaptation of his own rationale for conquering
Silesia.
Bismarck subjected the European balance of power to the same coldblooded,
relativistic analysis as he did the internal German situation. At the height of the
Crimean War, Bismarck outlined the principal options for Prussia:
We have three threats available: (1) An alliance with Russia; and it is nonsense always to swear at
once that we will never go with Russia. Even if it were true, we should retain the option to use it as a
threat. (2) A policy in which we throw ourselves into Austria’s arms and compensate ourselves at the
expense of perfidious [German] confederates. (3) A change of cabinets to the left whereby we would
soon become so “Western” as to outmaneuver Austria completely.43
In the same dispatch were listed as equally valid Prussian options: an alliance
with Russia against France (presumably on the basis of a community of
conservative interests); an arrangement with Austria against the secondary
German states (and presumably against Russia); and a shift toward liberalism
domestically directed against Austria and Russia (presumably in combination
with France). Like Richelieu, Bismarck felt unfettered in his choice of partners,
being prepared to ally himself with Russia, Austria, or France; the choice would
depend entirely on which could best serve the Prussian national interest. Though
a bitter opponent of Austria, Bismarck was prepared to explore an arrangement
with Vienna in return for appropriate compensation in Germany. And although
he was an archconservative in domestic affairs, Bismarck saw no obstacle to
shifting Prussia’s domestic policy to the left as long as it served a foreign policy
purpose. For domestic policy, too, was a tool of Realpolitik.
Attempts to tilt the balance of power had, of course, occurred even in the
heyday of the Metternich system. But then every effort would have been made to
legitimize the change by means of European consensus. The Metternich system
sought adjustments through European congresses rather than through a foreign
policy of threat and counterthreat. Bismarck would have been the last person to
reject the efficacy of moral consensus. But to him, it was only one element of
power among many. The stability of the international order depended precisely
on this nuance. Pressuring for change without so much as paying lip service to
existing treaty relationships, shared values, or the Concert of Europe marked a
diplomatic revolution. In time, turning power into the only criterion induced all
nations to conduct armament races and foreign policies of confrontation.
Bismarck’s views remained academic as long as the key element of the Vienna
settlement—the unity of the conservative courts of Prussia, Austria, and Russia
—was still intact, and as long as Prussia by itself did not dare to rupture that
unity. The Holy Alliance disintegrated unexpectedly and quite rapidly after the
Crimean War, when Austria abandoned the deft anonymity by which Metternich
had deflected crises from his rickety empire and, after many vacillations, sided
with Russia’s enemies. Bismarck understood at once that the Crimean War had
wrought a diplomatic revolution. “The day of reckoning,” he said, “is sure to
come even if a few years pass.”44
Indeed, perhaps the most important document relating to the Crimean War
was a dispatch from Bismarck analyzing the situation upon the conclusion of the
war in 1856. Characteristically, the dispatch assumed perfect flexibility of
diplomatic method and a total absence of scruple in the pursuit of opportunity.
German historiography has aptly named Bismarck’s dispatch the
“Prachtbericht,” or the “Master Dispatch.” For assembled therein was the
essence of Realpolitik, though it was still too daring for its addressee, the
Prussian Prime Minister, Otto von Manteuffel, whose numerous marginal
comments indicate that he was far from persuaded by it.
Bismarck opened with an exposition of Napoleon’s extraordinarily favorable
position at the end of the Crimean War. Henceforth, he noted, all the states of
Europe would be seeking France’s friendship, none with a greater prospect of
success than Russia:
An alliance between France and Russia is too natural that it should not come to pass…. Up to now
the firmness of the Holy Alliance… has kept the two states apart; but with the Tsar Nicholas dead
and the Holy Alliance dissolved by Austria, nothing remains to arrest the natural rapprochement of
two states with nary a conflicting interest.45
Bismarck predicted that Austria had maneuvered itself into a trap from which it
would not be able to escape by racing the Tsar to Paris. For in order to retain the
support of his army, Napoleon would require some issue which could furnish
him at a moment’s notice with “a not too arbitrary and unjust pretext for
intervention. Italy is ideally suited for this role. The ambitions of Sardinia, the
memories of Bonaparte and Murat, furnish sufficient excuses and the hatred of
Austria will smooth its way.”46 This was, of course, exactly what happened three
years later.
How should Prussia position itself in light of the inevitability of tacit FrancoRussian cooperation and the likelihood of a Franco-Austrian conflict? According
to the Metternich system, Prussia should have tightened its alliance with
conservative Austria, strengthened the German Confederation, established close
relations with Great Britain, and sought to wean Russia away from Napoleon.
Bismarck demolished each of these options in turn. Great Britain’s land forces
were too negligible to be of use against a Franco-Russian alliance. Austria and
Prussia would end up having to bear the brunt of the fighting. Nor could the
German Confederation add any real strength:
Aided by Russia, Prussia, and Austria, the German Confederation would probably hold together,
because it would believe in victory even without its support; but in the case of a two-front war
toward East and West, those princes who are not under the control of our bayonets would attempt to
save themselves through declarations of neutrality, if they did not appear in the field against us….47
Although Austria had been Prussia’s principal ally for over a generation, it now
presented a rather incongruous partner in Bismarck’s eyes. It had become the
main obstacle to Prussia’s growth: “Germany is too small for the two of us…, as
long as we plough the same furrow, Austria is the only state against which we
can make a permanent gain and to which we can suffer a permanent loss.”48
Whatever aspect of international relations he considered, Bismarck resolved it
by the argument that Prussia needed to break its confederate bond to Austria and
reverse the policies of the Metternich period in order to weaken its erstwhile ally
at every opportunity: “When Austria hitches a horse in front, we hitch one
behind.”49
The bane of stable international systems is their nearly total inability to
envision mortal challenge. The blind spot of revolutionaries is their conviction
that they can combine all the benefits of their goals with the best of what they
are overthrowing. But the forces unleashed by revolution have their own
momentum, and the direction in which they are moving cannot necessarily be
deduced from the proclamations of their advocates.
So it was with Bismarck. Within five years of coming to power in 1862, he
eliminated the Austrian obstacle to German unity by implementing his own
advice of the previous decade. Through the three wars described earlier in this
chapter, he expelled Austria from Germany and destroyed lingering Richelieuan
illusions in France.
The new united Germany did not embody the ideals of the two generations of
Germans who had aspired to build a constitutional, democratic state. In fact, it
reflected no previous significant strain of German thinking, having come into
being as a diplomatic compact among German sovereigns rather than as an
expression of popular will. Its legitimacy derived from Prussia’s power, not from
the principle of national self-determination. Though Bismarck achieved what he
had set out to do, the very magnitude of his triumph mortgaged the future of
Germany and, indeed, of the European world order. To be sure, he was as
moderate in concluding his wars as he had been ruthless in preparing them. As
soon as Germany had achieved the borders he considered vital to its security,
Bismarck conducted a prudent and stabilizing foreign policy. For two decades,
he maneuvered Europe’s commitments and interests in masterly fashion on the
basis of Realpolitik and to the benefit of the peace of Europe.
But, once called forth, the spirits of power refused to be banished by juggling
acts, however spectacular or restrained these were. Germany had been unified as
the result of a diplomacy presupposing infinite adaptability; yet the very success
of that policy removed all flexibility from the international system. There were
now fewer participants. And when the number of players declines, the capacity
to make adjustments diminishes. The new international system contained both
fewer and weightier components, making it difficult to negotiate a generally
acceptable balance or to sustain it without constant tests of strength.
These structural problems were magnified by the scope of Prussia’s victory in
the Franco-Prussian War and by the nature of the peace that concluded it. The
German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine produced irreconcilable French
antagonism, which eliminated any German diplomatic option toward France.
In the 1850s, Bismarck had considered the French option so essential that he
had sacrificed his friendship with Gerlach to promote it. After the annexation of
Alsace-Lorraine, French enmity grew into the “organic fault of our nature”
against which Bismarck had warned so insistently. And it precluded the policy of
his “Master Dispatch” of remaining aloof until other powers were already
committed, then selling Prussia’s support to whoever offered it the most.
The German Confederation had succeeded in acting as a unit only in the face
of threats so overwhelming that they had obliterated the rivalries among the
various states; and joint offensive action was structurally impossible. The
tenuousness of these arrangements was indeed one of the reasons Bismarck had
insisted that German unification be organized under Prussian leadership. But he
also paid a price for the new arrangement. Once Germany was transformed from
a potential victim of aggression to a threat to the European equilibrium, the
remote contingency of the other states of Europe uniting against Germany
became a real possibility. And that nightmare in turn drove a German policy that
was soon to split Europe into two hostile camps.
The European statesman who grasped the impact of German unification most
quickly was Benjamin Disraeli, who was about to become British Prime
Minister. In 1871, he said the following about the Franco-Prussian War:
The war represents the German revolution, a greater political event than the French Revolution of the
last century…. There is not a diplomatic tradition which has not been swept away. You have a new
world…. The balance of power has been entirely destroyed.50
While Bismarck was at the helm, these dilemmas were obscured by his intricate
and subtle diplomacy. Yet in the long term, the very complexity of Bismarck’s
arrangements doomed them. Disraeli was right on the mark. Bismarck had recast
the map of Europe and the pattern of international relations, but in the end he
was not able to establish a design his successors could follow. Once the novelty
of Bismarck’s tactics had worn off, his successors and competitors sought safety
in multiplying arms as a way of reducing their reliance on the baffling
intangibles of diplomacy. The Iron Chancellor’s inability to institutionalize his
policies forced Germany onto a diplomatic treadmill it could only escape, first
by an arms race, and then by war.
In his domestic policy as well, Bismarck was unable to establish a design his
successors could follow. Bismarck, a solitary figure in his lifetime, was even less
understood after he passed from the scene and attained mythic proportions. His
compatriots remembered the three wars which had achieved German unity but
forgot the painstaking preparations that had made them possible, and the
moderation required to reap their fruits. They had seen displays of power but
without discerning the subtle analysis on which these had been based.
The constitution which Bismarck had designed for Germany compounded
these tendencies. Though based on the first universal male suffrage in Europe,
the Parliament (the Reichstag) did not control the government, which was
appointed by the Emperor and could only be removed by him. The Chancellor
was closer to both the Emperor and the Reichstag than each was to the other.
Therefore, within limits, Bismarck could play Germany’s domestic institutions
off against each other, much as he did the other states in his foreign policy. None
of Bismarck’s successors possessed the skill or the daring to do so. The result
was that nationalism unleavened by democracy turned increasingly chauvinistic,
while democracy without responsibility grew sterile. The essence of Bismarck’s
life was perhaps best expressed by the Iron Chancellor himself in a letter he had
written to his then still future wife:
That which is imposing here on earth… has always something of the quality of the fallen angel who
is beautiful but without peace, great in his conceptions and exertions but without success, proud and
lonely.51
The two revolutionaries who stood at the beginning of the contemporary
European state system incarnated many of the dilemmas of the modern period.
Napoleon, the reluctant revolutionary, represented the trend of gearing policy to
public relations. Bismarck, the conservative revolutionary, reflected the tendency
to identify policy with the analysis of power.
Napoleon had revolutionary ideas but recoiled before their implications.
Having spent his youth in what the twentieth century would call protest, he never
bridged the gap between the formulation of an idea and its implementation.
Insecure about his purposes and indeed his legitimacy, he relied on public
opinion to bridge that gap. Napoleon conducted his foreign policy in the style of
modern political leaders who measure their success by the reaction of the
television evening news. Like them, Napoleon made himself a prisoner of the
purely tactical, focusing on short-term objectives and immediate results, seeking
to impress his public by magnifying the pressures he had set out to create. In the
process, he confused foreign policy with the moves of a conjurer. For in the end,
it is reality, not publicity, that determines whether a leader has made a difference.
The public does not in the long run respect leaders who mirror its own
insecurities or see only the symptoms of crises rather than the long-term trends.
The role of the leader is to assume the burden of acting on the basis of a
confidence in his own assessment of the direction of events and how they can be
influenced. Failing that, crises will multiply, which is another way of saying that
a leader has lost control over events. Napoleon turned out to be the precursor of
a strange modern phenomenon—the political figure who desperately seeks to
determine what the public wants, yet ends up rejected and perhaps even despised
by it.
Bismarck did not lack the confidence to act on his own judgments. He
brilliantly analyzed the underlying reality and Prussia’s opportunity. He built so
well that the Germany he created survived defeat in two world wars, two foreign
occupations, and two generations as a divided country. Where Bismarck failed
was in having doomed his society to a style of policy which could only have
been carried on had a great man emerged in every generation. This is rarely the
case, and the institutions of imperial Germany militated against it. In this sense,
Bismarck sowed the seeds not only of his country’s achievements, but of its
twentieth-century tragedies. “No one eats with impunity from the tree of
immortality,”52 wrote Bismarck’s friend von Roon about him.
Napoleon’s tragedy was that his ambitions surpassed his capacities;
Bismarck’s tragedy was that his capacities exceeded his society’s ability to
absorb them. The legacy Napoleon left France was strategic paralysis; the legacy
Bismarck left Germany was unassimilable greatness.
CHAPTER SIX
Realpolitik Turns on Itself
Realpolitik—foreign policy based on calculations of power and the national
interest—brought about the unification of Germany. And the unification of
Germany caused Realpolitik to turn on itself, accomplishing the opposite of what
it was meant to achieve. For the practice of Realpolitik avoids armaments races
and war only if the major players of an international system are free to adjust
their relations in accordance with changing circumstances or are restrained by a
system of shared values, or both.
After its unification, Germany became the strongest country on the Continent,
and was growing stronger with every decade, thereby revolutionizing European
diplomacy. Ever since the emergence of the modern state system in Richelieu’s
time, the powers at the edge of Europe—Great Britain, France, and Russia—had
been exerting pressure on the center. Now, for the first time, the center of Europe
was becoming sufficiently powerful to press on the periphery. How would
Europe deal with this new giant in its midst?
Geography had created an insoluble dilemma. According to all the traditions
of Realpolitik, European coalitions were likely to arise to contain Germany’s
growing, potentially dominant, power. Since Germany was located in the center
of the Continent, it stood in constant danger of what Bismarck called “le
cauchemar des coalitions”—the nightmare of hostile, encircling coalitions. But
if Germany tried to protect itself against a coalition of all its neighbors—East
and West—simultaneously, it was certain to threaten them individually, speeding
up the formation of coalitions. Self-fulfilling prophecies became a part of the
international system. What was still called the Concert of Europe was in fact
riven by two sets of animosities: the enmity between France and Germany, and
the growing hostility between the Austro-Hungarian and the Russian Empires.
As for France and Germany, the magnitude of Prussia’s victory in the 1870
war had produced a permanent French desire for revanche, and German
annexation of Alsace-Lorraine gave this resentment a tangible focal point.
Resentment soon mixed with fear as French leaders began to sense that the war
of 1870–71 had marked the end of the era of French predominance and an
irrevocable change in the alignment of forces. The Richelieu system of playing
the various German states off against each other in a fragmented Central Europe
no longer applied. Torn between memory and ambition, France sublimated its
frustrations for nearly fifty years in the single-minded pursuit of regaining
Alsace-Lorraine, never considering that success in this effort could do no more
than salve French pride without altering the underlying strategic reality. By
itself, France was no longer strong enough to contain Germany; henceforth it
would always need allies to defend itself. By the same token, France made itself
permanently available as the potential ally of any enemy of Germany, thereby
restricting the flexibility of German diplomacy and escalating any crisis
involving Germany.
The second European schism, between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and
Russia, also resulted from German unification. Upon becoming
Ministerpräsident in 1862, Bismarck had asked the Austrian ambassador to
convey to his Emperor the startling proposition that Austria, the capital of the
ancient Holy Roman Empire, move its center of gravity from Vienna to
Budapest. The ambassador considered the idea so preposterous that, in his report
to Vienna, he ascribed it to nervous exhaustion on the part of Bismarck. Yet,
once defeated in the struggle for preeminence in Germany, Austria had no choice
but to act on Bismarck’s suggestion. Budapest became an equal, occasionally
dominant partner in the newly created Dual Monarchy.
After its expulsion from Germany, the new Austro-Hungarian Empire had no
place to expand except into the Balkans. Since Austria had not participated in
overseas colonialism, its leaders had come to view the Balkans, with its Slavic
population, as the natural arena for Austrian geopolitical ambitions—if only to
keep pace with the other Great Powers. Inherent in such a policy was conflict
with Russia.
Common sense should have cautioned Austrian leaders against provoking
Balkan nationalism, or taking on Russia as a permanent enemy. But common
sense was not in abundant supply in Vienna, and even less so in Budapest.
Jingoistic nationalism prevailed. The Cabinet in Vienna continued on its course
of inertia at home and fits of hysteria in foreign policy, which had progressively
isolated it since Metternich’s time.
Germany perceived no national interest in the Balkans. But it did perceive a
major interest in the preservation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. For the
collapse of the Dual Monarchy would have risked undoing Bismarck’s entire
German policy. The German-speaking Catholic segment of the empire would
seek to join Germany, jeopardizing the preeminence of Protestant Prussia, for
which Bismarck had struggled so tenaciously. And the disintegration of the
Austrian Empire would leave Germany without a single dependable ally. On the
other hand, though Bismarck wanted to preserve Austria, he had no desire to
challenge Russia. It was a conundrum he could obscure for some decades, but
never quite overcome.
To make matters worse, the Ottoman Empire was in the throes of a slow
disintegration, creating frequent clashes between the Great Powers over the
division of the spoils. Bismarck once said that, in a combination of five players,
it is always desirable to be on the side of the three. But since, of the five Great
Powers—England, France, Russia, Austria, and Germany—France was hostile,
Great Britain unavailable due to its policy of “splendid isolation,” and Russia
ambivalent because of its conflict with Austria, Germany needed an alliance
with both Russia and Austria for such a grouping of three. Only a statesman
possessed of Bismarck’s willpower and skill could even have conceived such a
precarious balancing act. Thus, the relationship between Germany and Russia
became the key to the peace of Europe.
Once Russia entered the international arena, it established a dominant position
with astonishing speed. At the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, Russia had not yet
been deemed sufficiently important to be represented. From 1750 onward,
however, Russia became an active participant in every significant European war.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, Russia was already inspiring a vague
uneasiness in Western observers. In 1762, the French chargé d’affaires in St.
Petersburg reported:
If Russian ambition is not checked, its effects may be fatal to the neighboring powers…. I know that
the degree of Russian power should not be measured by its expanse and that its domination of eastern
territories is more an imposing phantom than a source of real strength. But I also suspect that a nation
which is capable of braving the intemperance of the seasons better than any other because of the rigor
of its native climate, which is accustomed to servile obedience, which needs little to live and is
therefore able to wage war at little cost… such a nation, I suspect, is likely to conquer….1
By the time the Congress of Vienna took place, Russia was arguably the most
powerful country on the Continent. By the middle of the twentieth century, it had
achieved the rank of one of only two global superpowers before imploding,
nearly forty years later, losing many of its vast gains of the previous two
centuries in a matter of months.
The absolute nature of the tsar’s power enabled Russia’s rulers to conduct
foreign policy both arbitrarily and idiosyncratically. In the space of six years,
between 1756 and 1762, Russia entered the Seven Years’ War on the side of
Austria and invaded Prussia, switched to Prussia’s side at the death of Empress
Elizabeth in January 1762, and then withdrew into neutrality when Catherine the
Great overthrew her husband in June 1762. Fifty years later, Metternich would
point out that Tsar Alexander I had never held a single set of beliefs for longer
than five years. Metternich’s adviser, Friedrich von Gentz, described the position
of the Tsar as follows: “None of the obstacles that restrain and thwart the other
sovereigns—divided authority, constitutional forms, public opinion, etc.—exists
for the Emperor of Russia. What he dreams of at night he can carry out in the
morning.”2
Paradox was Russia’s most distinguishing feature. Constantly at war and
expanding in every direction, it nevertheless considered itself permanently
threatened. The more polyglot the empire became, the more vulnerable Russia
felt, partly because of its need to isolate the various nationalities from their
neighbors. To sustain their rule and to surmount the tensions among the empire’s
various populations, all of Russia’s rulers invoked the myth of some vast, foreign
threat, which, in time, turned into another of the self-fulfilling prophecies that
doomed the stability of Europe.
As Russia expanded from the area around Moscow toward the center of
Europe, the shores of the Pacific, and into Central Asia, its quest for security
evolved into expansion for its own sake. The Russian historian Vasili
Kliuchevsky described the process as follows: “…these wars, defensive in their
origin, imperceptibly and unintentionally on the part of the Muscovite politicians
became wars of aggression—a direct continuation of the unifying policy of the
old [pre-Romanov] dynasty, a struggle for Russian territory that had never
belonged to the Muscovite state.”3
Russia gradually turned into as much of a threat to the balance of power in
Europe as it did to the sovereignty of neighbors around its vast periphery. No
matter how much territory it controlled, Russia inexorably pushed its borders
outward. This started out as an essentially defensive motivation, as when Prince
Potemkin (best known for placing fake villages along the Tsarina’s routes)
advocated the conquest of the Crimea from Turkey in 1776 on the reasonable
ground that this would improve Russia’s capacity to defend its realm.4 By 1864,
however, security had become synonymous with continuous expansion.
Chancellor Aleksandr Gorchakov defined Russia’s expansion in Central Asia in
terms of a permanent obligation to pacify its periphery driven forward by sheer
momentum:
The situation of Russia in Central Asia is similar to that of all civilized states that come into contact
with half-savage nomadic tribes without a firm social organization. In such cases, the interests of
border security and trade relations always require that the more civilized state have a certain
authority over its neighbors….
The state therefore must make a choice: either to give up this continuous effort and doom its
borders to constant unrest… or else to advance farther and farther into the heart of the savage lands…
where the greatest difficulty lies in being able to stop.5
Many historians recalled this passage when the Soviet Union invaded
Afghanistan in 1979.
Paradoxically, it is also true that for the past 200 years the European balance
of power has been preserved on several occasions by Russian efforts and
heroism. Without Russia, Napoleon and Hitler would almost certainly have
succeeded in establishing universal empires. Janus-like, Russia was at once a
threat to the balance of power and one of its key components, essential to the
equilibrium but not fully a part of it. For much of its history, Russia accepted
only the limits that were imposed on it by the outside world, and even these
grudgingly. And yet there were periods, most notably the forty years after the
end of the Napoleonic Wars, when Russia did not take advantage of its vast
power, and instead put this power in the service of protecting conservative
values in Central and Western Europe.
Even when Russia was pursuing legitimacy, its attitudes were far more
messianic—and therefore imperialistic—than those of the other conservative
courts. Whereas Western European conservatives defined themselves by
philosophies of self-restraint, Russian leaders enlisted themselves in the service
of crusades. Because the tsars faced virtually no challenge to their legitimacy,
they had little understanding of republican movements beyond deeming them to
be immoral. Promoters of the unity of conservative values—at least until the
Crimean War—they were also prepared to use legitimacy to expand their own
influence, earning Nicholas I the sobriquet of “gendarme of Europe.” At the
height of the Holy Alliance, Friedrich von Gentz wrote this about Alexander I:
The Emperor Alexander, despite all the zeal and enthusiasm he has consistently shown for the Grand
Alliance, is the sovereign who could most easily get along without it…. For him the Grand Alliance
is only an implement with which he exercises in general affairs the influence that is one of the main
objects of his ambition…. His interest in the preservation of the system is not, as is true of Austria,
Prussia, or England, an interest based on necessity or fear; it is a free and calculated interest, which
he is in a position to renounce as soon as a different system should offer him greater advantages.6
Like Americans, Russians thought of their society as exceptional. Encountering
only nomadic or feudal societies, Russia’s expansion into Central Asia had many
of the features of America’s own westward expansion, and the Russian
justification for it, in keeping with the Gorchakov citation above, paralleled the
way Americans explained their own “manifest destiny.” But the closer Russia
approached India, the more it aroused British suspicions, until, in the second half
of the nineteenth century, Russian expansion into Central Asia, unlike America’s
westward march, turned into a foreign policy problem.
The openness of each country’s frontiers was among the few common features
of American and Russian exceptionalism. America’s sense of uniqueness was
based on the concept of liberty; Russia’s sprang from the experience of common
suffering. Everyone was eligible to share in America’s values; Russia’s were
available only to the Russian nation, to the exclusion of most of its non-Russian
subjects. America’s exceptionalism led it to isolationism alternating with
occasional moral crusades; Russia’s evoked a sense of mission which often led
to military adventures.
The Russian nationalist publicist Mikhail Katkov defined the difference
between Western and Russian values as follows:
…everything there is based on contractual relations and everything here on faith; this contrast was
originally determined by the position the church adopted in the West and that which it adopted in the
East. A basic dual authority exists there; a single authority here.7
Nationalist Russian and Pan-Slavic writers and intellectuals invariably ascribed
the alleged altruism of the Russian nation to its Orthodox faith. The great
novelist and passionate nationalist Fyodor Dostoyevsky interpreted Russian
altruism as an obligation to liberate Slavic peoples from foreign rule, if
necessary by defying the opposition of the whole of Western Europe. During
Russia’s 1877 campaign in the Balkans, Dostoyevsky wrote:
Ask the people; ask the soldier; Why are they arising? Why are they going to war and what do they
expect from it? They will tell you, as one man, that they are going to serve Christ and to liberate the
oppressed brethren…. [W]e shall watch over their mutual harmony and protect their liberty and
independence, be it even against all Europe.8
Unlike the states of Western Europe, which Russia simultaneously admired,
despised, and envied, Russia perceived itself not as a nation but as a cause,
beyond geopolitics, impelled by faith, and held together by arms. Dostoyevsky
did not confine the role of Russia to liberating fellow Slavs and included
watching over their harmony—a social undertaking which easily shaded over
into domination. To Katkov, Russia was the Third Rome:
The Russian tsar is more than the heir of his ancestors; he is the successor of the caesars of Eastern
Rome, of the organizers of the church and of its councils which established the very creed of the
Christian faith. With the fall of Byzantium, Moscow arose and the greatness of Russia began.9
After the Revolution, the passionate sense of mission was transferred to the
Communist International.
The paradox of Russian history lies in the continuing ambivalence between
messianic drive and a pervasive sense of insecurity. In its ultimate aberration,
this ambivalence generated a fear that, unless the empire expanded, it would
implode. Thus, when Russia acted as the prime mover in the partitioning of
Poland, it did so partly for security reasons and partly for eighteenth-centurystyle aggrandizement. A century later, that conquest had taken on an autonomous
significance. In 1869, Rostislav Andreievich Fadeyev, a Pan-Slavist officer,
wrote in his influential essay, “Opinion on the Eastern Question,” that Russia
had to continue its westward march to protect its existing conquests:
The historical move of Russia from the Dnieper to the Vistula [the partition of Poland] was a
declaration of war to Europe, which had broken into a part of the Continent which did not belong to
her. Russia now stands in the midst of the enemy’s lines—such a condition is only temporary: she
must either drive back the enemy or abandon the position… must either extend her preeminence to
the Adriatic or withdraw again beyond the Dnieper….10
Fadeyev’s analysis was not very different from George Kennan’s, which was
made from the opposite side of the dividing line, in his seminal article on the
sources of Soviet conduct. In it, he predicted that if the Soviet Union did not
succeed in expanding, it would implode and collapse.11
Russia’s exalted view of itself was rarely shared by the outside world. Despite
extraordinary achievements in literature and music, Russia never emerged as the
same sort of cultural magnet for its conquered peoples as did the mother
countries of some of the other colonial empires. Nor was the Russian Empire
ever perceived as a model, either by other societies or by its own subjects. To the
outside world, Russia was an elemental force—a mysterious, expansionist
presence to be feared and contained, by either co-optation or confrontation.
Metternich had tried the route of co-optation and, for a generation, had been
largely successful. But after the unification of Germany and Italy, the great
ideological causes of the first half of the nineteenth century had lost their
unifying force. Nationalism and revolutionary republicanism were no longer
perceived as threats to the European order. As nationalism became the prevailing
organizing principle, the crowned heads of Russia, Prussia, and Austria had less
and less need to join together in a common defense of legitimacy.
Metternich had been able to establish an approximation of European
government because the rulers of Europe considered their ideological unity as
the indispensable breakwater against revolution. But by the 1870s, either the fear
of revolution had subsided or the various governments thought they could defeat
it without outside assistance. By now, two generations had passed since the
execution of Louis XVI; the liberal revolutions of 1848 had been mastered;
France, though a republic, had lost its proselytizing zeal. No common
ideological bond now constrained the ever-sharpening conflict between Russia
and Austria over the Balkans, or between Germany and France over Alsace-
Lorraine. When the Great Powers viewed each other, they no longer saw partners
in a common cause but dangerous, even mortal, rivals. Confrontation emerged as
the standard diplomatic method.
In an earlier period, Great Britain had contributed to restraint by acting as the
balancer of the European equilibrium. Even now, of all the major European
countries, only Great Britain was in a position to conduct a balance-of-power
diplomacy unfettered by irreconcilable animosity toward some other power. But
Great Britain had grown confused as to what constituted the central threat, and
would not regain its bearings for several decades.
The balance of power of the Vienna system, with which Great Britain was
familiar, had been radically altered. Unified Germany was achieving the strength
to dominate Europe all by itself—an occurrence which Great Britain had always
resisted in the past when it came about by conquest. However, most British
leaders, Disraeli excepted, saw no reason to oppose a process of national
consolidation in Central Europe, which British statesmen had welcomed for
decades, especially when its culmination occurred as the result of a war in which
France had been technically the aggressor.
Ever since Canning had distanced Great Britain from Metternich’s system
forty years earlier, Great Britain’s policy of splendid isolation had enabled it to
play the role of protector of the equilibrium largely because no single country
was capable of dominating the Continent by itself. After unification, Germany
progressively acquired that capacity. And, confusingly, it did so by means of
developing its own national territory and not by conquest. It was Great Britain’s
style to intervene only when the balance of power was actually under attack and
not against the prospect of attack. Since it took decades for the German threat to
the European equilibrium to become explicit, Great Britain’s foreign policy
concerns for the rest of the century were focused on France, whose colonial
ambitions clashed with those of Great Britain, especially in Egypt, and on
Russia’s advance toward the Straits, Persia, India, and later toward China. All of
these were colonial issues. In regard to European diplomacy, which produced the
crises and wars of the twentieth century, Great Britain continued to practice its
policy of splendid isolation.
Bismarck was therefore the dominant figure of European diplomacy until he
was dismissed from office in 1890. He wanted peace for the newly created
German Empire and sought no confrontation with any other nation. But in the
absence of moral bonds among the European states, he faced a Herculean task.
He was obliged to keep both Russia and Austria out of the camp of his French
enemy. This required preventing Austrian challenges to legitimate Russian
objectives and keeping Russia from undermining the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
He needed good relations with Russia without antagonizing Great Britain, which
was keeping a wary eye on Russian designs on Constantinople and India. Even a
genius like Bismarck could not have performed such a precarious balancing act
indefinitely; the intensifying strains on the international system were becoming
less and less manageable. Nevertheless, for the nearly twenty years that
Bismarck led Germany, he practiced the Realpolitik he had preached with such
moderation and subtlety that the balance of power never broke down.
Bismarck’s goal was to give no other power—except irreconcilable France—
any cause to join an alliance directed against Germany. Professing the unified
Germany to be “satiated” and without further territorial ambitions, Bismarck
sought to reassure Russia that Germany had no interest in the Balkans; the
Balkans, he said, were not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.
Keeping Great Britain in mind, Bismarck mounted no challenge on the
Continent that might trigger a British concern for the equilibrium, and he kept
Germany out of the colonial race. “Here is Russia and here is France and here
we are in the middle. That is my map of Africa,” was Bismarck’s reply to an
advocate of German colonialism12—a piece of advice domestic politics would
later force him to modify.
Reassurance was not enough, however. What Germany needed was an alliance
with both Russia and Austria, improbable as that appeared at first glance. Yet
Bismarck forged just such an alliance in 1873—the first socalled Three
Emperors’ League. Proclaiming the unity of the three conservative courts, it
looked a great deal like Metternich’s Holy Alliance. Had Bismarck suddenly
developed an affection for the Metternich system which he had done so much to
destroy? The times had changed largely as a result of Bismarck’s successes.
Though Germany, Russia, and Austria pledged in true Metternich fashion to
cooperate in the repression of subversive tendencies in each other’s domains, a
common aversion to political radicals could no longer hold the Eastern Courts
together—above all because each had become confident that domestic upheavals
could be repressed without outside aid.
Moreover, Bismarck had lost his solid legitimist credentials. Though his
correspondence with Gerlach (see chapter 5) had not been made public, his
underlying attitudes were common knowledge. As an advocate of Realpolitik
throughout his public career, he could not suddenly make dedication to
legitimacy credible. The increasingly bitter geopolitical rivalry between Russia
and Austria came to transcend the unity of conservative monarchs. Each was in
pursuit of the Balkan spoils of the decaying Turkish Empire. Pan-Slavism and
old-fashioned expansionism were contributing to an adventurous Russian policy
in the Balkans. Plain fear was producing parallel attitudes in the Austro-
Hungarian Empire. Thus, while on paper the German Emperor had an alliance
with his fellow conservative monarchs in Russia and Austria, these two brethren
were in fact at each other’s throats. The challenge of how to deal with two
partners who perceived each other as mortal threats was destined to torment
Bismarck’s alliance system for the remainder of his days.
The first Three Emperors’ League taught Bismarck that he could no longer
control the forces he had unleashed by appealing to Austria’s and Russia’s
domestic principles. Henceforth, he would attempt to manipulate them by
emphasizing power and self-interest.
Two events above all demonstrated that Realpolitik had become the dominant
trend of the period. The first occurred in 1875 in the form of a pseudo-crisis, a
contrived war scare triggered by an editorial in a leading German newspaper
bearing the provocative headline “Is War Imminent?” The editorial had been
placed in reaction to an increase in French military expenditures and the
purchase of a large number of horses by the French military. Bismarck may well
have inspired the war scare without intending to go any further, for there was no
partial German mobilization or threatening troop movements.
Facing down a nonexistent threat is an easy way to enhance a nation’s
standing. Clever French diplomacy created the impression that Germany was
planning a preemptive attack. The French Foreign Office put out the story that,
in a conversation with the French Ambassador, the Tsar had indicated he would
support France in a Franco-German conflict. Great Britain, ever sensitive to the
threat of a single power dominating Europe, began to stir. Prime Minister
Disraeli instructed his Foreign Secretary, Lord Derby, to approach Russian
Chancellor Gorchakov with the idea of intimidating Berlin:
My own impression is that we should construct some concerted movement to preserve the peace of
Europe like Pam [Lord Palmerston] did when he baffled France and expelled the Egyptians from
Syria. There might be an alliance between Russia and ourselves for this special purpose; and other
powers, as Austria and perhaps Italy might be invited to accede….13
That Disraeli, deeply distrustful of Russia’s imperial ambitions, could even hint
at an Anglo-Russian alliance showed how seriously he took the prospect of
German domination of Western Europe. The war scare subsided as quickly as it
had blown up, so Disraeli’s scheme was never tested. Although Bismarck did not
know the details of Disraeli’s maneuver, he was too astute not to have sensed
Britain’s underlying concern.
As George Kennan has demonstrated,14 there was far less to this crisis than
the publicity made it seem. Bismarck had no intention of going to war so soon
after humiliating France, though he did not object to leaving France with the
impression that he might do so if pushed too far. Tsar Alexander II was not about
to guarantee republican France, though he did not mind conveying to Bismarck
that that option existed.15 Thus, Disraeli was reacting to what was still a
chimera. Still, the combination of British uneasiness, French maneuvering, and
Russian ambivalence convinced Bismarck that only an active policy could stave
off the coalition-building which would result a generation later in the Triple
Entente, aimed at Germany.
The second crisis was real enough. It came in the form of yet another Balkan
crisis, which demonstrated that neither philosophical nor ideological bonds could
hold the Three Emperors’ League together in the face of the underlying clash of
national interests. Because it laid bare the conflict which would ultimately doom
Bismarck’s European order and plunge Europe into World War I, it will be
treated here in some detail.
The Eastern Question, dormant since the Crimean War, again came to
dominate the international agenda in the first series of convoluted imbroglios,
which, as the century progressed, would become as stereotyped as Japanese
Kabuki plays. Some almost accidental event would trigger a crisis; Russia would
make threats and Great Britain would dispatch the Royal Navy. Russia would
then occupy some part of the Ottoman Balkans to hold as hostage. Great Britain
would threaten war. Negotiations would start, during which Russia would reduce
its demands, at which precise point the whole thing would blow up.
In 1876, the Bulgarians, who for centuries had lived under Turkish rule,
rebelled and were joined by other Balkan peoples. Turkey responded with
appalling brutality, and Russia, swept up by Pan-Slavic sentiments, threatened to
intervene.
In London, Russia’s response raised the all-too-familiar specter of Russian
control of the Straits. Ever since Canning, British statesmen had observed the
maxim that, if Russia controlled the Straits, it would dominate the Eastern
Mediterranean and the Near East, thereby threatening Great Britain’s position in
Egypt. Therefore, according to British conventional wisdom, the Ottoman
Empire, decrepit and inhuman as it was, had to be preserved even at the risk of
war with Russia.
This state of affairs presented Bismarck with a grave dilemma. A Russian
advance capable of provoking a British military reaction was also likely to rouse
Austria to enter the fray. And if Germany was forced to choose between Austria
and Russia, Bismarck’s foreign policy would be wrecked along with the Three
Emperors’ League. Whatever happened, Bismarck faced the risk of antagonizing
either Austria or Russia, and of quite possibly incurring the wrath of all the
parties if he adopted a neutral attitude. “We have always avoided,” Bismarck
said before the Reichstag in 1878, “in the case of differences of opinion between
Austria and Russia, building a majority of two against one by taking the side of
one of [the] parties….”16
The moderation was classical Bismarck, though it also defined a mounting
dilemma as the crisis unfolded. Bismarck’s first move was to attempt to tighten
the bonds of the Three Emperors’ League by seeking to develop a common
position. In early 1876, the Three Emperors’ League drew up the socalled Berlin
Memorandum warning Turkey against continuing its repression. It seemed to
imply that, with certain provisos, Russia might intervene in the Balkans on
behalf of the Concert of Europe, much as Metternich’s Congresses of Verona,
Laibach, and Troppau had designated some European power to carry out their
decisions.
But there was one enormous difference between taking such action then and
doing so now. In Metternich’s day, Castlereagh was the British Foreign Secretary
and had been sympathetic to intervention by the Holy Alliance, even though
Great Britain had refused to participate in it. But now Disraeli was the Prime
Minister, and he interpreted the Berlin Memorandum as the first step toward
dismantling the Ottoman Empire to the exclusion of Great Britain. This was too
close to the European hegemony Great Britain had been opposing for centuries.
Complaining to Shuvalov, the Russian Ambassador to London, Disraeli said:
“England has been treated as though we were Montenegro or Bosnia.”17 To his
frequent correspondent Lady Bradford, he wrote:
There is no balance and unless we go out of our way to act with the three Northern Powers, they can
act without us which is not agreeable for a state like England.18
Given the unity being displayed by St. Petersburg, Berlin, and Vienna, it would
have been exceedingly difficult for Great Britain to resist whatever they might
agree upon. It appeared that Disraeli had no choice but to join the Northern
Courts while Russia assaulted Turkey.
However, in the tradition of Palmerston, Disraeli decided to flex British
muscles. He moved the Royal Navy to the Eastern Mediterranean and
proclaimed his pro-Turkish sentiments—guaranteeing that Turkey would prove
obdurate, and forcing whatever latent differences existed in the Three Emperors’
League into the open. Never known for excessive modesty, Disraeli declared to
Queen Victoria that he had broken the Three Emperors’ League. It was, he
believed, “virtually extinct, as extinct as the Roman triumvirate.”19
Benjamin Disraeli was one of the strangest and most extraordinary figures
ever to head a British government. Upon learning that he would be named Prime
Minister in 1868, he exulted: “Hurray! Hurray! I’ve climbed to the top of the
greasy pole!” By contrast, when Disraeli’s permanent adversary, William Ewart
Gladstone, was invited to succeed him that same year, he penned a prolix
reflection on the responsibilities of power and his sacred duties to God, which
included the prayer that the Almighty imbue him with the fortitude required to
carry out the grave responsibilities of the prime minister’s office.
The pronouncements of the two great men who dominated British politics in
the second half of the nineteenth century capture their antipodal natures: Disraeli
—meretricious, brilliant, and mercurial; Gladstone—learned, pious, and grave. It
was no small irony that the Victorian Tory Party, composed of country squires
and devoutly Anglican aristocratic families, should have produced as its leader
this brilliant Jewish adventurer, and that the party of quintessential insiders
should have brought to the forefront of the world’s stage the quintessential
outsider. No Jew had ever risen to such heights in British politics. A century
later, it would again be the seemingly hidebound Tories rather than the selfconsciously progressive Labour Party that would bring Margaret Thatcher into
office—a greengrocer’s daughter who proved to be another remarkable leader
and Great Britain’s first female prime minister.
Disraeli’s had been an unlikely career. A novelist as a young man, he was
more a member of the literati than a policymaker, and was much more likely to
have concluded his life as a scintillating writer and conversationalist than as one
of the seminal British political figures of the nineteenth century. Like Bismarck,
Disraeli believed in expanding the vote to the common man, convinced that the
middle classes in England would vote Conservative.
As Tory leader, Disraeli articulated a new form of imperialism different from
the essentially commercial expansion Great Britain had practiced since the
seventeenth century—by which, it was said, it had built an empire in a fit of
absent-mindedness. For Disraeli, the Empire was not an economic necessity but
a spiritual one, and a prerequisite to his country’s greatness. “The issue is not a
mean one,” he proclaimed in his famous 1872 Crystal Palace speech. “It is
whether you will be content to be a comfortable England, modeled and molded
upon Continental principles and meeting in due course an inevitable fate, or
whether you will be a great country—an Imperial country—a country where
your sons, when they rise, rise to paramount positions, and obtain not merely the
esteem of their countrymen, but command the respect of the world.”20
Adhering to convictions such as these, Disraeli was bound to oppose Russia’s
threat to the Ottoman Empire. In the name of the European equilibrium, he
would not accept the prescriptions of the Three Emperors’ League, and in the
name of the British Empire, he would oppose Russia as the enforcer of a
European consensus on the approaches to Constantinople. For, in the course of
the nineteenth century, the notion that Russia was the principal threat to Great
Britain’s position in the world had taken firm hold. Great Britain perceived its
overseas interests menaced by a Russian pincer movement, one prong of which
was aimed at Constantinople and the other at India via Central Asia. In the
course of its expansion across Central Asia during the second half of the
nineteenth century, Russia had elaborated methods of conquest which would
become stereotyped. The victim was always so far from the center of world
affairs that few Westerners had any precise idea of what was taking place. They
could thus fall back on their preconceptions that the tsar was in fact benevolent
and his subordinates were bellicose, turning distance and confusion into tools of
Russian diplomacy.
Of the European Powers, only Great Britain concerned itself with Central
Asia. As Russian expansion pushed ever southward in the direction of India,
London’s protests were stonewalled by Chancellor Prince Aleksandr Gorchakov,
who often did not know what the Russian armies were doing. Lord Augustus
Loftus, the British Ambassador in St. Petersburg, speculated that Russia’s
pressure on India “had not originated with the Sovereign, although he is an
absolute monarch, but rather from the dominant part played by the military
administration. Where an enormous standing army is maintained, it is absolutely
necessary to find employment for it…. When a system of conquest sets in, as in
Central Asia, one acquisition of territory leads to another, and the difficulty is
where to stop.”21 This observation, of course, practically replicated Gorchakov’s
own words (see page 141, above). On the other hand, the British Cabinet did not
much care whether Russia was threatening India by momentum or out of
deliberate imperialism.
The same pattern was repeated again and again. Each year, Russian troops
would penetrate deeper into the heart of Central Asia. Great Britain would ask
for an explanation and receive all kinds of assurances that the Tsar did not intend
to annex one square meter of land. At first, such soothing words were able to put
matters to rest. But, inevitably, another Russian advance would reopen the issue.
For instance, after the Russian army occupied Samarkand (in present-day
Uzbekistan) in May 1868, Gorchakov told the British Ambassador, Sir Andrew
Buchanan, “that the Russian Government not only did not wish, but that they
deeply regretted, the occupation of that city, and he was assured that it would not
be permanently retained.”22 Samarkand, of course, remained under Russian
sovereignty until the collapse of the Soviet Union more than a century later.
In 1872, the same charade was repeated a few hundred miles to the southeast
with respect to the principality of Khiva on the border of present-day
Afghanistan. Count Shuvalov, the Tsar’s aide-de-camp, was sent to London to
reassure the British that Russia had no intention of annexing additional territory
in Central Asia:
Not only was it far from the intention of the Emperor to take possession of Khiva, but positive orders
had been prepared to prevent it, and directions given that conditions imposed should be such as could
not in any way lead to a prolonged occupation of Khiva.23
These assurances had hardly been uttered when word arrived that Russian
General Kaufmann had crushed Khiva and imposed a treaty which was the
dramatic opposite of Shuvalov’s assertions.
In 1875, these methods were applied to Kokand, another principality on the
border of Afghanistan. On this occasion, Chancellor Gorchakov felt some need
to justify the gap between Russia’s assurances and its actions. Ingeniously, he
devised an unprecedented distinction between unilateral assurances (which,
according to his definition, had no binding force) and formal, bilateral
engagements. “The Cabinet in London,” he wrote in a note, “appears to derive,
from the fact of our having on several occasions spontaneously and amicably
communicated to them our views with respect to Central Asia, and particularly
our firm resolve not to pursue a policy of conquest or annexation, a conviction
that we have contracted definite engagements toward them in regard to this
matter.”24 In other words, Russia would insist on a free hand in Central Asia,
would set its own limits, and not be bound even by its own assurances.
Disraeli was not about to permit a replay of these methods at the approaches
to Constantinople. He encouraged the Ottoman Turks to reject the Berlin
Memorandum and to continue their depredations in the Balkans. Despite this
show of British firmness, Disraeli was under severe domestic pressure. The
Turks’ atrocities had turned British public opinion against them, and Gladstone
was railing against the amorality of Disraeli’s foreign policy. Disraeli thus felt
obliged to accede to the London Protocol of 1877, in which he joined the three
Northern courts in calling on Turkey to end the slaughter in the Balkans and to
reform its administration in the region. The Sultan, however, convinced that
Disraeli was on his side no matter what formal demands were made, rejected
even this document. Russia’s response was a declaration of war.
For a moment, it appeared as if Russia had won the diplomatic game. Not only
was it backed by the other two Northern courts, but by France as well, in
addition to having a good deal of support in British public opinion. Disraeli’s
hands were tied; going to war on behalf of Turkey might well bring down his
government.
But, as in many previous crises, the Russian leaders overplayed their hand.
Led by the brilliant but reckless general and diplomat Nicholas Ignatyev,
Russian troops arrived at the gates of Constantinople. Austria began to
reconsider its backing of the Russian campaign. Disraeli moved British warships
into the Dardanelles. At that point, Ignatyev shocked all of Europe by
announcing the terms of the Treaty of San Stefano, which would emasculate
Turkey and create a “Big Bulgaria.” Extending to the Mediterranean Sea, this
enlarged state, it was widely assumed, would be dominated by Russia.
Since 1815, conventional wisdom in Europe had deemed that the fate of the
Ottoman Empire could only be resolved by the Concert of Europe as a whole
and not by any one power, least of all by Russia. Ignatyev’s Treaty of San
Stefano raised the possibilities of Russian control of the Straits, which was
intolerable to Great Britain, and Russian control of the Balkan Slavs, which was
intolerable to Austria. Both Great Britain and Austria-Hungary, therefore,
declared that the Treaty was unacceptable.
Suddenly, Disraeli no longer stood alone. To Russia’s leaders, his moves
signaled the ominous portent of a return of the Crimean War coalition. When
Foreign Secretary Lord Salisbury issued his famous Memorandum of April 1878
outlining why the Treaty of San Stefano had to be revised, even Shuvalov, the
Russian Ambassador to London and a longtime rival of Ignatyev, agreed. Great
Britain threatened war if Russia moved into Constantinople, while Austria
threatened war over the division of the spoils in the Balkans.
Bismarck’s cherished Three Emperors’ League teetered on the verge of
collapse. Until this moment, Bismarck had been extraordinarily circumspect. In
August 1876, a year before Russian armies moved on Turkey “for the cause of
Orthodoxy and Slavdom,” Gorchakov had proposed to Bismarck that the
Germans host a congress to settle the Balkan crisis. Whereas Metternich or
Napoleon III would have jumped at the opportunity to play chief mediator of the
Concert of Europe, Bismarck demurred, believing that a congress could only
make the differences within the Three Emperors’ League explicit. He confided
privately that all the participants, including Great Britain, would emerge from
such a congress “ill-disposed towards us because not one of them would receive
from us the support which he expected.”25 Bismarck also thought it unwise to
bring Disraeli and Gorchakov together—“ministers of equally dangerous
vanity,” was how he described them.
Nevertheless, as it increasingly appeared that the Balkans would become the
fuse to set off a general European war, Bismarck reluctantly organized a
congress in Berlin, the only capital to which the Russian leaders were willing to
come. Yet he preferred to keep his distance from the day-to-day diplomacy,
prevailing upon Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister Andrássy to send out the
invitations.
The Congress was scheduled to assemble on June 13, 1878. Before it met,
however, Great Britain and Russia had already settled the key issues in an
agreement between Lord Salisbury and the new Russian Foreign Minister,
Shuvalov, signed on May 30. The “Big Bulgaria” created by the Treaty of San
Stefano was replaced by three new entities: a much-reduced, independent state
of Bulgaria; the state of Eastern Rumelia, an autonomous entity that was
technically under a Turkish governor but whose administration would be
overseen by a European Commission (a forerunner of United Nations
peacekeeping projects of the twentieth century); the rest of Bulgaria reverted to
Turkish rule. Russia’s gains in Armenia were reduced. In separate secret
agreements, Great Britain promised Austria that it would support Austria’s
occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and assured the Sultan that it would
guarantee Asiatic Turkey. In return, the Sultan gave England the use of Cyprus
as a naval base.
By the time the Congress of Berlin met, the danger of war which had induced
Bismarck to agree to host the gathering had largely dissipated. The main
function of the Congress was to give Europe’s blessing to what had already been
negotiated. One wonders whether Bismarck would have risked placing himself
in the inherently precarious role of mediator had he been able to foresee this
outcome. Of course, it is likely that the very imminence of a congress had caused
Russia and England to settle separately and rapidly, not wishing to expose to the
vagaries of a European congress gains which were far more attainable from each
other in direct negotiations.
Working out the details of an already concluded agreement is not exactly
heroic work. All the major countries except Great Britain were represented by
their foreign ministers. For the first time in British history, both a prime minister
and a foreign minister attended an international congress outside the British Isles
because Disraeli did not want to delegate the already largely assured prospect of
a major diplomatic achievement to Salisbury. The vain and aged Gorchakov,
who had negotiated with Metternich at the Congresses of Laibach and Verona
more than half a century before, chose the Congress of Berlin for his final
appearance on the international stage. “I do not wish to be extinguished like a
lamp that is smoking. I want to sink down as though I were a star,” he declared
upon his arrival in Berlin.26
When asked to reflect on the center of gravity at the Congress, Bismarck
pointed to Disraeli: “Der alte Jude, das ist der Mann” (The old Jew, he is the
man).27 Though their backgrounds could not have been more different, these two
men came to admire each other. Both subscribed to Realpolitik and hated what
they considered moralistic cant. The religious overtones of Gladstone’s
pronouncements (a man both Disraeli and Bismarck detested) seemed pure
humbug to them. Neither Bismarck nor Disraeli had any sympathy for the
Balkan Slavs, whom they viewed as chronic and violent troublemakers. Both
men were given to biting, cynical quips, broad generalizations, and sarcastic
barbs. Bored with nettlesome detail, Bismarck and Disraeli preferred to approach
policy in bold, dramatic strokes.
It can be argued that Disraeli was the only statesman who ever got the better
of Bismarck. Disraeli arrived at the Congress in the impregnable position of
having already achieved his aims—a position which Castlereagh had enjoyed at
Vienna, and Stalin after the Second World War. The remaining issues concerned
the details of implementing the previous agreement between Great Britain and
Russia, and the essentially technical military question of whether Turkey or the
new Bulgaria should control the Balkan passes. For Disraeli, the strategic
problem at the Congress was to deflect from Great Britain as much as possible
Russia’s frustration at having to relinquish some of its conquests.
Disraeli succeeded because Bismarck’s own position was so complicated.
Bismarck perceived no German interest in the Balkans, and basically had no
preference with respect to the issues at hand other than that war between Austria
and Russia had to be avoided at nearly any cost. He described his role at the
Congress as that of the “ehrlicher Makler” (honest broker) and introduced
almost every statement at the Congress with the words: “L’Allemagne, qui n’est
liée par aucun intérêt direct dans les affaires d’Orient…” (Germany, which has
no direct interest of any kind in Eastern questions…).28
Though Bismarck understood the game being played all too well, he
nevertheless felt like a person in a nightmare who sees danger approaching but is
unable to avoid it. When the German parliament urged Bismarck to take a
stronger stand, he retorted that he intended to steer clear. Bismarck pointed out
the perils of mediation by referring to an incident in 1851 when Tsar Nicholas I
had intervened between Austria and Prussia, in effect on Austria’s side:
Then Tsar Nicholas played the role that [my opponent] now presumes to give Germany; he
(Nicholas) came and said: “The first one who shoots, I’ll shoot,” and as a result peace was
maintained. To whose advantage, and to whose disadvantage, that belongs to history, and I don’t
want to discuss it here. I am simply asking, was this role that Tsar Nicholas played, in which he took
one side, ever repaid in gratitude? Certainly not by us in Prussia!… Was Tsar Nicholas thanked by
Austria? Three years later came the Crimean War, and I don’t need to say anything more.29
Nor, he might have added, did the Tsar’s intervention prevent Prussia from
ultimately consolidating Northern Germany—the real issue in 1851.
Bismarck played the hand he had been dealt as well as possible. His approach
was generally to back Russia on questions concerning the eastern part of the
Balkans (such as the annexation of Bessarabia) and to support Austria on those
relating to the western part (such as the occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina). On
only one issue did he come down against Russia. When Disraeli threatened to
leave the Congress unless Turkey was left in possession of the mountain passes
facing Bulgaria, Bismarck interceded with the Tsar to overrule the Russian
negotiator, Shuvalov.
In this manner, Bismarck avoided the estrangement with Russia that had
befallen Austria after the Crimean War. But he did not emerge unscathed. Many
leading Russians felt cheated of victory. Russia might defer territorial gains for
the sake of legitimacy (as Alexander I did in the Greek rebellion in the 1820s,
and Nicholas I during the revolutions of 1848), but Russia never relinquished an
ultimate objective or accepted compromise as just. Checks to Russian
expansionism generally produced sullen resentment.
Thus, after the Congress of Berlin, Russia blamed its failure to achieve all of
its aims on the Concert of Europe rather than on its own excessive ambition; not
on Disraeli, who had organized the coalition against Russia and threatened war,
but on Bismarck, who had managed the Congress in order to avoid a European
war. Russia had grown accustomed to British opposition; but that the role of
honest broker was being assumed by a traditional ally like Germany was treated
by Pan-Slavists as an affront. The Russian nationalist press styled the Congress
as a “European coalition against Russia under the leadership of Prince
Bismarck,”30 who was turned into a scapegoat for Russia’s failure to achieve its
exorbitant goals.
Shuvalov, the principal Russian negotiator at Berlin, who was therefore in a
position to know the real state of affairs, summed up Russian jingoistic attitudes
in the aftermath of the Congress:
One prefers to leave people with the mad illusion that Russia’s interests have been grievously
damaged by the action of certain foreign powers, and in this way one gives sustenance to the most
pernicious agitation. Everyone wants peace; the condition of the country urgently demands it, but at
the same time one tries to divert to the outside world the effects of the discontents produced, in
reality, by the mistakes of one’s own policies.31
Shuvalov, however, did not reflect Russian public opinion. Though the Tsar
himself did not venture as far as his jingoist press or radical Pan-Slavists, neither
was he fully reconciled to the outcome of the Congress. In the decades ahead,
German perfidy at Berlin would become the staple of many a Russian policy
document, including several just prior to the outbreak of World War I. The Three
Emperors’ League, based on the unity of conservative monarchs, could no longer
be maintained. Henceforth, if there was to be any cohesive force in international
affairs, it would have to be Realpolitik itself.
In the 1850s, Bismarck had advocated a policy which was the Continental
equivalent of England’s own policy of “splendid isolation.” He had urged
aloofness from entanglements before throwing Prussia’s weight behind
whichever side seemed best to serve the Prussian national interest at any given
point. This approach avoided alliances, which limited freedom of action, and
above all, gave Prussia more options than any potential rival. During the 1870s,
Bismarck sought to consolidate the unification of Germany by returning to the
traditional alliance with Austria and Russia. But in the 1880s, an unprecedented
situation came about. Germany was too strong to stand aloof, for that might
unite Europe against it. Nor could it any longer rely on the historic, almost
reflexive, support of Russia. Germany was a giant in need of friends.
Bismarck solved this dilemma by completely reversing his previous approach
to foreign policy. If he could no longer operate the balance of power by having
fewer commitments than any potential adversary, he would arrange more
relationships with more countries than any conceivable opponent and thereby be
able to choose among many allies, as circumstances required. Abandoning the
freedom of maneuver which had characterized his diplomacy for the previous
twenty years, Bismarck began to build a system of alliances deftly engineered on
the one hand to keep Germany’s potential adversaries from coalescing and, on
the other, to restrain the actions of Germany’s partners. In each of Bismarck’s
sometimes contradictory coalitions, Germany was always closer to the various
partners than any of them was to each other; hence Bismarck always had a veto
over common action as well as an option of independent action. For a decade he
succeeded in maintaining pacts with his allies’ adversaries so that he could
restrain tension on all sides.
Bismarck initiated his new policy in 1879 by making a secret alliance with
Austria. Aware of Russia’s resentment after the Congress of Berlin, he now
hoped to build a barrier to further Russian expansion. Unwilling, however, to
permit Austria to use German backing to challenge Russia, he also secured a
veto over Austrian policy in the Balkans. The warmth with which Salisbury
greeted the Austro-German alliance—with the biblical good “tidings of great
joy”—assured Bismarck that he was not alone in wanting to check Russian
expansionism. Salisbury no doubt hoped that henceforth Austria, backed by
Germany, would assume Great Britain’s burden of resisting Russian expansion
toward the Straits. Fighting battles for other countries’ national interest was not
Bismarck’s specialty. He was especially loath to do so in the Balkans, because he
felt such deep disdain for that region’s quarrels. “One must give these sheepstealers plainly to understand,” he rumbled about the Balkans on one occasion,
“that the European governments have no need to harness themselves to their
lusts and their rivalries.”32 Unfortunately for the peace of Europe, his successors
would forget these words of caution.
Bismarck proposed to restrain Russia in the Balkans through alliance rather
than confrontation. For his part, the Tsar was brought up short at the prospect of
isolation. Considering Great Britain to be Russia’s chief adversary and France
still too weak and, above all, too republican to be a plausible ally, the Tsar
agreed to resurrect the Three Emperors’ League, this time on the basis of
Realpolitik The benefit of an alliance with his principal opponent was not
immediately apparent to the Austrian Emperor. He would have preferred a
grouping with Great Britain, with which he shared a common interest in
blocking Russia’s advance toward the Straits. But Disraeli’s defeat in 1880 and
Gladstone’s advent to power had ended that prospect; Great Britain’s
participation, even indirectly, in a pro-Turkish, anti-Russian alliance was no
longer in the cards.
The second Three Emperors’ League made no pretense to any moral concerns.
Expressed in the precise conditionally of Realpolitik, it committed its signatories
to benevolent neutrality in the event that one of them engaged in a war with a
fourth country—for instance, should England go to war with Russia, or France
with Germany. Germany was thus protected against a two-front war, and Russia
was protected against the restoration of the Crimean coalition (of Great Britain,
France, and Austria), while Germany’s commitment to defend Austria against
aggression remained intact. Responsibility for resisting Russian expansionism in
the Balkans was shifted onto Great Britain by precluding Austria from joining a
coalition aimed at Russia—at least on paper. By balancing partially offsetting
alliances, Bismarck was able to achieve almost the same freedom of action he
had enjoyed in his previous phase of diplomatic aloofness. Above all, he had
removed the incentives that might have turned a local crisis into a general war.
In 1882, the year following the second Three Emperors’ League, Bismarck
cast his net even more widely by persuading Italy to transform the Dual Alliance
between Austria and Germany into a Triple Alliance, including Italy. In general,
Italy had stayed aloof from the diplomacy of Central Europe, but it now resented
the French conquest of Tunisia, which had preempted its own designs in North
Africa. Likewise, the shaky Italian monarchy thought that some demonstration
of Great Power diplomacy might enable it to resist better the rising tide of
republicanism. For its part, Austria sought additional insurance should the Three
Emperors’ League prove incapable of restraining Russia. In forming the Triple
Alliance, Germany and Italy pledged mutual assistance against a French attack,
while Italy pledged neutrality to Austria-Hungary in case of a war with Russia,
easing Austrian worries about a two-front war. Finally, in 1887, Bismarck
encouraged his two allies, Austria and Italy, to conclude the socalled
Mediterranean Agreements with Great Britain, by which the parties agreed to
preserve jointly the status quo in the Mediterranean.
Bismarck’s diplomacy had produced a series of interlocking alliances,
partially overlapping and partially competitive, which ensured Austria against
Russian attack, Russia against Austrian adventurism, and Germany against
encirclement, and which drew England into resisting Russian expansion toward
the Mediterranean. To reduce challenges to his intricate system, Bismarck did his
utmost to satisfy French ambitions everywhere except in Alsace-Lorraine. He
encouraged French colonial expansion, in part to deflect French energies from
Central Europe, but more to embroil France with colonial rivals, especially Great
Britain.
For over a decade, that calculation proved accurate. France and Great Britain
nearly clashed over Egypt, France became estranged from Italy over Tunisia, and
Great Britain continued to oppose Russia in Central Asia and on the approaches
to Constantinople. Eager to avoid conflict with England, Bismarck eschewed
colonial expansion until the mid-1880s, limiting Germany’s foreign policy to the
Continent, where his aims were to preserve the status quo.
But, in the end, the requirements of Realpolitik became too intricate to sustain.
With the passage of time, the conflict between Austria and Russia in the Balkans
became unmanageable. Had the balance of power operated in its purest form, the
Balkans would have been divided into Russian and Austrian spheres of
influence. But public opinion was already too inflamed for such a policy, even in
the most autocratic states. Russia could not agree to spheres of influence which
left Slavic populations to Austria, and Austria would not agree to strengthening
what it considered Russia’s Slavic dependencies in the Balkans.
Bismarck’s eighteenth-century-style Cabinet Diplomacy was becoming
incompatible with an age of mass public opinion. The two representative
governments of Great Britain and France responded to their public opinions as a
matter of course. In France, this meant mounting pressure for the recovery of
Alsace-Lorraine. But the most striking example of the vital new role of public
opinion was in Great Britain, when Gladstone defeated Disraeli in 1880 in the
only British election fought largely over foreign policy issues, and then reversed
Disraeli’s Balkan policy.
Gladstone, perhaps the dominant figure of British politics in the nineteenth
century, viewed foreign policy in much the same way as Americans did after
Wilson. Judging foreign policy by moral instead of geopolitical criteria, he
argued that the national aspirations of the Bulgarians were in fact legitimate, and
that, as a fellow Christian nation, Great Britain owed support to Bulgaria against
the Muslim Turks. The Turks should be made to behave, argued Gladstone, by a
coalition of powers which would then assume responsibility for the
administration of Bulgaria. Gladstone put forth the same concept that came to be
known under President Wilson as “collective security”: Europe needed to act
jointly, otherwise Great Britain should not act at all.
It must be done, it can only be done with safety, by the united action of the Powers of Europe. Your
power is great; but what is above all things essential is, that the mind and heart of Europe in this
matter should be one. I need now only speak of the six whom we call great Powers; of Russia,
Germany, Austria, France, England, and Italy. The union of them all is not only important, but almost
indispensable for, entire success and satisfaction.33
In 1880, Gladstone, offended by Disraeli’s emphasis on geopolitics, launched
his landmark Midlothian Campaign, the first whistle-stop campaign in history
and the first in which the issues of foreign policy were taken directly to the
people. In his old age, Gladstone suddenly came into his own as a public
speaker. Asserting that morality was the only basis for a sound foreign policy,
Gladstone insisted that Christian decency and respect for human rights ought to
be the guiding lights of British foreign policy, not the balance of power and the
national interest. At one stop, he declared:
Remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan is as inviolable in the eye of
Almighty God as can be your own. Remember that He who has united you as human beings in the
same flesh and blood has bound you by the law of mutual love… not limited by the boundaries of
Christian civilization….34
Gladstone blazed a trail which Wilson later followed when he claimed that there
could be no distinction between the morality of the individual and the morality
of the state. Like Wilson a generation later, he thought that he had detected a
global trend toward peaceful change policed by world public opinion:
Certain it is that a new law of nations is gradually taking hold of the mind, and coming to sway the
practice, of the world; a law which recognises independence, which frowns upon aggression, which
favours the pacific, not the bloody settlement of disputes, which aims at permanent and not
temporary adjustments; above all, which recognises, as a tribunal of paramount authority, the general
judgement of civilised mankind.35
Every word in this paragraph could have been uttered by Wilson and the
implication of it was certainly very similar to Wilson’s League of Nations. In
drawing a distinction between his policy and Disraeli’s in 1879, Gladstone
stressed that, rather than practicing a balance of power, he would strive “to keep
the Powers of Europe in union together. And why? Because by keeping all in
union together you neutralize and fetter and bind up the selfish aims of each….
Common action is fatal to selfish aims….”36 Of course, the inability to keep all
of Europe together was the precise cause for mounting tensions. No cause was
foreseeable—certainly not the future of Bulgaria—that could heal the breach
between France and Germany, or between Austria and Russia.
No British prime minister before Gladstone had used such rhetoric.
Castlereagh had treated the Concert of Europe as an instrument for enforcing the
Vienna settlement. Palmerston saw it as a tool for preserving the balance of
power. Far from viewing the Concert of Europe as an enforcer of the status quo,
Gladstone assigned it the revolutionary role of bringing about an entirely new
world order. These ideas were to remain dormant until Wilson appeared on the
scene a generation later.
To Bismarck, such views were pure anathema. It is not surprising that these
two titanic figures cordially detested each other. Bismarck’s attitude toward
Gladstone paralleled that of Theodore Roosevelt toward Wilson: he considered
the great Victorian part humbug, part menace. Writing to the German Emperor in
1883, the Iron Chancellor noted:
Our task would be easier if in England that race of great statesmen of earlier times who had an
understanding of European politics, had not completely died out. With such an incapable politician as
Gladstone, who is nothing but a great orator, it is impossible to pursue a policy in which England’s
position can be counted upon.37
Gladstone’s view of his adversary was far more direct, for instance, when he
called Bismarck “the incarnation of evil.”38
Gladstone’s ideas on foreign policy suffered the same fate as Wilson’s, in that
they stirred his compatriots to withdrawal from global affairs rather than greater
participation. On the level of day-to-day diplomacy, Gladstone’s coming to
power in 1880 made little difference to Great Britain’s imperial policy in Egypt
and east of Suez. But it did keep England from being a factor in the Balkans and
in the European equilibrium in general.
Gladstone’s second tenure in office (1880–85) thus had the paradoxical effect
of removing the safety net under Bismarck, the most moderate of the Continental
statesmen, just as Canning’s withdrawal from Europe had driven Metternich
toward the Tsar. As long as the Palmerston/Disraeli view dominated British
foreign policy, Great Britain could serve as the last resort whenever Russia went
too far in the Balkans or on the approaches to Constantinople. With Gladstone,
this assurance came to an end, making Bismarck ever more dependent on his
increasingly anachronistic triangle with Austria and Russia.
The Eastern Courts—heretofore the bulwark of conservatism—in a way
proved even more susceptible to nationalistic public opinion than the
representative governments. Germany’s domestic structure had been designed by
Bismarck to permit him to apply to it the maxims of his balance-of-power
diplomacy, yet it also had a strong tendency to invite demagoguery. Despite the
fact that the Reichstag was elected by what was the widest suffrage in Europe,
German governments were appointed by the emperor and reported to him, not to
the Reichstag.
Thus deprived of responsibility, Reichstag members were at liberty to indulge
in the most extreme rhetoric. The fact that the military budget was voted for
periods of five years at a time tempted governments to create crises during the
crucial year in which the defense program would be voted. Given enough time,
this arrangement might well have evolved into a constitutional monarchy with a
government responsible to Parliament. But during the crucial, formative years of
the new Germany, governments were highly susceptible to nationalist
propaganda and too prone to inventing foreign dangers to rally their
constituencies.
Russian foreign policy, too, suffered from the rabid propaganda of the PanSlavs, whose basic themes were a call for an aggressive policy in the Balkans
and a showdown with Germany. A Russian official explained to the Austrian
ambassador toward the end of the reign of Alexander II, in 1879:
People here are simply afraid of the nationalistic press…. It is the flag of nationalism they have
pinned upon themselves that protects them and assures them of powerful support. Ever since the
nationalistic tendency has come so prominently to the fore, and particularly since it succeeded in
prevailing against all better advice, in the question of going to war [against Turkey], the socalled
“national” party… has become a real power, especially because it embraces the entire army.39
Austria, the other polyglot empire, was in a similar position.
In these circumstances, it became increasingly difficult for Bismarck to
execute his precarious balancing act. In 1881, a new tsar, Alexander III, came to
the throne in St. Petersburg, unrestrained by conservative ideology like his
grandfather, Nicholas I, or by personal affection for the aged German Emperor,
like his father, Alexander II. Indolent and autocratic, Alexander III distrusted
Bismarck, in part because Bismarck’s policy was too complicated for him to
understand. On one occasion he even said that, whenever he saw any mention of
Bismarck in a dispatch, he placed a cross next to his name. The Tsar’s suspicions
were reinforced by his Danish wife, who could not forgive Bismarck for taking
Schleswig-Holstein from her native country.
The Bulgarian crisis of 1885 brought all these impulses to a head. Another
revolt produced the greater Bulgaria which Russia had sought so passionately a
decade earlier, and which Great Britain and Austria had feared. Demonstrating
how history can falsify the most firmly held expectations, the new Bulgaria, far
from being dominated by Russia, was unified under a German prince. The court
at St. Petersburg blamed Bismarck for what the German chancellor in fact would
have far preferred to avoid. The Russian court was outraged and the Pan-Slavs,
who saw a conspiracy in every corner west of the Vistula, spread the rumor that
Bismarck was behind a diabolical anti-Russian plot. In this atmosphere,
Alexander refused to renew the Three Emperors’ League in 1887.
Bismarck, however, was not ready to give up on his Russian option. He knew
that, left to its own devices, Russia would sooner or later drift into an alliance
with France. Yet in the conditions of the 1880s, with Russia and Great Britain
permanently on the verge of war, such a course increased Russia’s peril vis-à-vis
Germany without diminishing British antagonism. Moreover, Germany still had
a British option, especially now that Gladstone had left office. Alexander, in any
event, had good reason to doubt that France would run the risk of war over the
Balkans. In other words, Russo-German ties still reflected a very real, if
diminishing, convergence of national interests and not simply Bismarck’s
predilections—though, without his diplomatic skill, these common interests
would not have found formal expression.
Ever ingenious, Bismarck now came up with his last major initiative, the
socalled Reinsurance Treaty. Germany and Russia promised each other to stay
neutral in a war with a third country unless Germany attacked France, or Russia
attacked Austria. Theoretically, Russia and Germany were now guaranteed
against a two-front war, provided they stayed on the defensive. However, much
depended on how the aggressor was defined, especially since mobilization was
becoming increasingly equated with a declaration of war (see chapter 8). Since
that question was never posed, there were obvious limits to the Reinsurance
Treaty, the utility of which was further impaired by the Tsar’s insistence on
keeping it secret.
The secrecy of the agreement was the clearest illustration of the conflict
between the requirements of cabinet diplomacy and the imperatives of an
increasingly democratized foreign policy. Matters had become so complex that
two levels of secrecy existed within the secret Reinsurance Treaty. The second
level was a particularly confidential codicil in which Bismarck promised not to
stand in the way of Russia’s attempt to acquire Constantinople, and to help
increase Russian influence in Bulgaria. Neither assurance would have gladdened
Germany’s ally, Austria, not to speak of Great Britain—though Bismarck would
hardly have been unhappy had Great Britain and Russia become embroiled over
the future of the Straits.
Despite its complexities, the Reinsurance Treaty maintained the indispensable
link between St. Petersburg and Berlin. And it reassured St. Petersburg that,
though Germany would defend the integrity of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it
would not assist in its expansion at Russia’s expense. Germany thus achieved at
least a delay in a Franco-Russian alliance.
That Bismarck had put his intricate foreign policy into the service of restraint
and the preservation of peace was shown by his reaction to pressure from
German military leaders urging a preemptive war against Russia when the Three
Emperors’ League ended in 1887. Bismarck doused all such speculations in a
speech to the Reichstag in which he tried to give St. Petersburg a reputation to
uphold as a way of discouraging a Franco-Russian alliance:
Peace with Russia will not be disturbed from our side; and I do not believe Russia will attack us. I
also do not believe that the Russians are looking around for alliances in order to attack us in company
with others, or that they would be inclined to take advantages of difficulties that we might encounter
on another side, in order to attack us with ease.40
Nevertheless, for all its dexterity and moderation, Bismarck’s balancing act was
due to end soon. The maneuvers were becoming too complex to sustain, even for
the master. Overlapping alliances designed to ensure restraint led to suspicion
instead, while the growing importance of public opinion reduced everyone’s
flexibility.
However skillful Bismarck’s diplomacy, the need for so high a degree of
manipulation was proof of the strains which a powerful, unified Germany had
placed on the European balance of power. Even while Bismarck was still at the
helm, imperial Germany inspired disquiet. Indeed, Bismarck’s machinations,
which were intended to provide reassurance, over time had an oddly unsettling
effect, partly because his contemporaries had such difficulty comprehending
their increasingly convoluted nature. Fearful of being outmaneuvered, they
tended to hedge their bets. But this course of action also limited flexibility, the
mainspring of Realpolitik as a substitute for conflict.
Though Bismarck’s style of diplomacy was probably doomed by the end of
his period in office, it was far from inevitable that it should have been replaced
by a mindless armaments race and rigid alliances more comparable to the later
Cold War than to a traditional balance of power. For nearly twenty years,
Bismarck preserved the peace and eased international tension with his
moderation and flexibility. But he paid the price of misunderstood greatness, for
his successors and would-be imitators could draw no better lesson from his
example than multiplying arms and waging a war which would cause the suicide
of European civilization.
By 1890, the concept of the balance of power had reached the end of its
potential. It had been made necessary in the first place by the multitude of states
emerging from the ashes of medieval aspirations to universal empire. In the
eighteenth century, its corollary of raison d’état had led to frequent wars whose
primary function was to prevent the emergence of a dominant power and the
resurrection of a European empire. The balance of power had preserved the
liberties of states, not the peace of Europe.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A Political Doomsday Machine: European
Diplomacy Before the First World War
By the end of the twentieth century’s first decade, the Concert of Europe,
which had maintained peace for a century, had for all practical purposes ceased
to exist. The Great Powers had thrown themselves with blind frivolity into a
bipolar struggle that led to petrification into two power blocs, anticipating the
pattern of the Cold War fifty years later. There was one important difference,
however. In the age of nuclear weapons, the avoidance of war would be a major,
perhaps the principal, foreign policy goal. At the beginning of the twentieth
century, wars could still be started with a touch of frivolity. Indeed, some
European thinkers held that periodic bloodletting was cathartic, a naïve
hypothesis that was brutally punctured by the First World War.
For decades, historians have been debating who must bear responsibility for
the outbreak of the First World War. Yet no one country can be singled out for
that mad dash to disaster. Each of the major powers contributed its quota of
shortsightedness and irresponsibility, and did so with an insouciance which
would never again be possible once the disaster they had wrought entered the
collective memory of Europe. They had forgotten Pascal’s warning in Pensées—
if they had ever known it—“We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting
something in front of us to stop us seeing it.”
There was surely enough blame to go around. The nations of Europe
transformed the balance of power into an armaments race without understanding
that modern technology and mass conscription had made general war the
greatest threat to their security, and to European civilization as a whole. Though
all the nations of Europe contributed to the disaster with their policies, it was
Germany and Russia which undermined any sense of restraint by their very
natures.
Throughout the process of German unification, there had been little concern
about its impact on the balance of power. For 200 years, Germany had been the
victim, not the instigator, of the wars of Europe. In the Thirty Years’ War, the
Germans had suffered casualties estimated as high as 30 percent of their entire
population, and most of the decisive battles of the dynastic wars of the
eighteenth century and of the Napoleonic Wars were fought on German soil.
It was therefore nearly inevitable that a united Germany would aim to prevent
the recurrence of these tragedies. But it was not inevitable that the new German
state should have approached this challenge largely as a military problem, or that
German diplomats after Bismarck should have conducted foreign policy with
such bullying assertiveness. Whereas Frederick the Great’s Prussia had been the
weakest of the Great Powers, soon after unification, Germany became the
strongest and as such proved disquieting to its neighbors. In order to participate
in the Concert of Europe, it therefore needed to show special restraint in its
foreign policy.1 Unfortunately, after Bismarck’s departure, moderation was the
quality Germany lacked the most.
The reason German statesmen were obsessed with naked power was that, in
contrast to other nation-states, Germany did not possess any integrating
philosophical framework. None of the ideals which had shaped the modern
nation-state in the rest of Europe was present in Bismarck’s construction—not
Great Britain’s emphasis on traditional liberties, the French Revolution’s appeal
to universal freedom, or even the benign universalist imperialism of Austria.
Strictly speaking, Bismarck’s Germany did not embody the aspirations of a
nation-state at all, because he had deliberately excluded the Austrian Germans.
Bismarck’s Reich was an artifice, being foremost a greater Prussia whose
principal purpose was to increase its own power.
The absence of intellectual roots was a principal cause of the aimlessness of
German foreign policy. The memory of having served for so long as Europe’s
main battlefield had produced a deep-seated sense of insecurity in the German
people. Though Bismarck’s empire was now the strongest power on the
Continent, German leaders always felt vaguely threatened, as was evidenced by
their obsession with military preparedness compounded by bellicose rhetoric.
German military planners always thought in terms of fighting off a combination
of all of Germany’s neighbors simultaneously. In readying themselves for that
worst-case scenario, they helped to make it a reality. For a Germany strong
enough to defeat a coalition of all its neighbors was obviously also more than
capable of overwhelming any of them individually. At the sight of the military
colossus on their borders, Germany’s neighbors drew together for mutual
protection, transforming the German quest for security into an agent of its own
insecurity.
A wise and restrained policy might have postponed and perhaps even averted
the looming peril. But Bismarck’s successors, abandoning his restraint, relied
more and more on sheer strength, as expressed in one of their favorite
pronouncements—that Germany was to serve as the hammer and not the anvil of
European diplomacy. It was as if Germany had expended so much energy on
achieving nationhood that it had not had time to think through what purpose the
new state should serve. Imperial Germany never managed to develop a concept
of its own national interest. Swayed by the emotions of the moment and
hampered by an extraordinary lack of sensitivity to foreign psyches, German
leaders after Bismarck combined truculence with indecisiveness, hurling their
country, first into isolation and then into war.
Bismarck had taken great pains to downplay assertions of German power,
using his intricate system of alliances to restrain his many partners and to keep
their latent incompatibilities from erupting into war. Bismarck’s successors
lacked the patience and the subtlety for such complexity. When Emperor
William I died in 1888, his son, Frederick (whose liberalism had so worried
Bismarck), governed for a mere ninety-eight days before succumbing to throat
cancer. He was succeeded by his son, William II, whose histrionic demeanor
gave observers the uneasy sense that the ruler of Europe’s most powerful nation
was both immature and erratic. Psychologists have ascribed William’s restless
bullying to an attempt to compensate for having been born with a deformed arm
—a grave blow to a member of Prussia’s royal family with its exalted military
traditions. In 1890, the brash young Emperor dismissed Bismarck, refusing to
govern in the shadow of so towering a figure. Henceforth, it was the Kaiser’s
diplomacy which would become so central to the peace of Europe. Winston
Churchill captured William’s essence in sardonic style:
Just strut around and pose and rattle the undrawn sword. All he wished was to feel like Napoleon,
and be like him without having had to fight his battles. Surely less than this would not pass muster. If
you are the summit of a volcano, the least you can do is smoke. So he smoked, a pillar of cloud by
day and the gleam of fire by night, to all who gazed from afar; and slowly and surely these perturbed
observers gathered and joined themselves together for mutual protection.
…but underneath all this posing and its trappings, was a very ordinary, vain, but on the whole
well-meaning man, hoping to pass himself off as a second Frederick the Great.2
What the Kaiser wanted most was international recognition of Germany’s
importance and, above all, of its power. He attempted to conduct what he and his
entourage called Weltpolitik, or global policy, without ever defining that term or
its relationship to the German national interest. Beyond the slogans lay an
intellectual vacuum: truculent language masked an inner hollowness; vast
slogans obscured timidity and the lack of any sense of direction. Boastfulness
coupled with irresolution in action reflected the legacy of two centuries of
German provincialism. Even if German policy had been wise and responsible,
integrating the German colossus into the existing international framework would
have been a daunting task. But the explosive mix of personalities and domestic
institutions prevented any such course, leading instead to a mindless foreign
policy which specialized in bringing down on Germany everything it had always
feared.
In the twenty years after Bismarck’s dismissal, Germany managed to foster an
extraordinary reversal of alliances. In 1898, France and Great Britain had been
on the verge of war over Egypt. Animosity between Great Britain and Russia
had been a constant factor of international relations for most of the nineteenth
century. At various times, Great Britain had been looking for allies against
Russia, trying Germany before settling on Japan. No one would have thought
that Great Britain, France, and Russia could possibly end up on the same side.
Yet, ten years later, that was exactly what came to pass under the impact of
insistent and threatening German diplomacy.
For all the complexity of his maneuvers, Bismarck had never attempted to go
beyond the traditions of the balance of power. His successors, however, were
clearly not comfortable with the balance of power, and never seemed to
understand that, the more they magnified their own strength, the more they
would encourage the compensating coalitions and arms buildups inherent in the
system of European equilibrium.
German leaders resented the reluctance of other countries to ally themselves
with a nation that was already the strongest in Europe, and whose strength was
generating fears of German hegemony. Bullying tactics seemed to Germany’s
leaders the best way to bring home to their neighbors the limits of their own
strength and, presumably, the benefits of Germany’s friendship. This taunting
approach had quite the opposite effect. Trying to achieve absolute security for
their country, German leaders after Bismarck threatened every other European
nation with absolute insecurity, triggering countervailing coalitions nearly
automatically. There are no diplomatic shortcuts to domination; the only route
that leads to it is war, a lesson the provincial leaders of post-Bismarck Germany
learned only when it was too late to avoid a global catastrophe.
Ironically, for the greater part of imperial Germany’s history, Russia, not
Germany, was considered the main threat to peace. First Palmerston and then
Disraeli were convinced that Russia intended to penetrate into Egypt and India.
By 1913, the corresponding fear among German leaders that they were about to
be overrun by the Russian hordes had reached such a pitch that it contributed
significantly to their decision to force the fateful showdown a year later.
In fact, there was little hard evidence to substantiate the fear that Russia might
seek a European empire. The claims by German military intelligence of having
proof that Russia was in fact preparing for such a war were as true as they were
irrelevant. All the countries of both alliances, intoxicated with the new
technology of railways and mobilization schedules, were constantly engaged in
military preparations out of proportion to any of the issues being disputed. But,
precisely because these fervid preparations could not be related to any definable
objective, they were interpreted as portents of vast, if nebulous, ambitions.
Characteristically, Prince von Bülow, German Chancellor from 1900 to 1909,
espoused Frederick the Great’s view that “of all Prussia’s neighbors the Russian
Empire is the most dangerous in its strength as well as in its position.”3
Throughout, Europe found something decidedly eerie about the vastness and
persistence of Russia. All the nations of Europe were seeking aggrandizement by
means of threats and counterthreats. But Russia seemed impelled to expand by a
rhythm all its own, containable only by the deployment of superior force, and
usually by war. Throughout numerous crises, a reasonable settlement often
seemed well within Russia’s reach, much better in fact than what ultimately
emerged. Yet Russia always preferred the risk of defeat to compromise. This had
been true in the Crimean War of 1854, the Balkan Wars of 1875–78, and prior to
the Russo-Japanese War of 1904.
One explanation for these tendencies was that Russia belonged partly to
Europe, partly to Asia. In the West, Russia was part of the Concert of Europe
and participated in the elaborate rules of the balance of power. But even there,
Russian leaders were generally impatient with appeals to the equilibrium and
prone to resorting to war if their demands were not met—for example, in the
prelude to the Crimean War of 1854, and the Balkan Wars, and again in 1885,
when Russia nearly went to war with Bulgaria. In Central Asia, Russia was
dealing with weak principalities to which the principle of the balance of power
did not apply, and in Siberia—until it ran up against Japan—it was able to
expand much as America had across a sparsely populated continent.
In European forums, Russia would listen to the arguments on behalf of the
balance of power but did not always abide by its maxims. Whereas the nations of
Europe had always maintained that the fate of Turkey and the Balkans had to be
settled by the Concert of Europe, Russia, on the other hand, invariably sought to
deal with this question unilaterally and by force—in the Treaty of Adrianople in
1829, the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi in 1833, the conflict with Turkey in 1853,
and the Balkan Wars of 1875–78 and 1885. Russia expected Europe to look the
other way and felt aggrieved when it did not. The same problem would recur
after the Second World War, when the Western allies maintained that the fate of
Eastern Europe concerned Europe as a whole, while Stalin insisted that Eastern
Europe, and especially Poland, were within the Soviet sphere and that therefore
their future should be settled without reference to the Western democracies. And,
like his tsarist predecessors, Stalin proceeded unilaterally. Inevitably, however,
some coalition of Western forces would arise to resist Russia’s military thrusts
and to undo Russia’s impositions on its neighbors. In the post-World War II
period, it would take a generation for the historic pattern to reassert itself.
Russia on the march rarely exhibited a sense of limits. Thwarted, it nursed its
grievances and bided its time for revenge—against Great Britain through much
of the nineteenth century, against Austria after the Crimean War, against
Germany after the Congress of Berlin, and against the United States during the
Cold War. It remains to be seen how the new post-Soviet Russia will react to the
collapse of its historic empire and satellite orbit once it fully absorbs the shock
of its disintegration.
In Asia, Russia’s sense of mission was even less constrained by political or
geographic obstacles. For all of the eighteenth century and most of the
nineteenth, Russia found itself alone in the Far East. It was the first European
power to deal with Japan, and the first to conclude an agreement with China.
This expansion, accomplished by relatively few settlers and military adventurers,
produced no conflict with the European powers. Sporadic Russian clashes with
China proved no more significant. In return for Russian assistance against
warring tribes, China conceded large areas of territory to Russian administration
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, giving rise to a series of “unequal
treaties” which every Chinese government since then, especially the communist
one, has denounced.
Characteristically, Russia’s appetite for Asian territory seemed to grow with
each new acquisition. In 1903, Serge Witte, the Russian Finance Minister and a
confidant of the Tsar, wrote to Nicholas II: “Given our enormous frontier with
China and our exceptionally favorable situation, the absorption by Russia of a
considerable part of the Chinese Empire is only a question of time.”4 As with the
Ottoman Empire, Russia’s leaders took the position that the Far East was
Russia’s own business and that the rest of the world had no right to intervene.
Russia’s advances on all fronts sometimes occurred simultaneously; more often
they shifted back and forth, depending on where expansion seemed least risky.
Imperial Russia’s policymaking apparatus reflected the empire’s dual nature.
Russia’s Foreign Office was a department of the Chancery, staffed by
independent officials whose orientation was essentially toward the West.5
Frequently Baltic Germans, these officials considered Russia a European state
with policies which should be implemented in the context of the Concert of
Europe. The Chancery’s role, however, was contested by the Asiatic Department,
which was equally independent and responsible for Russian policy toward the
Ottoman Empire, the Balkans, and the Far East—in other words, for every front
where Russia was actually advancing.
Unlike the Chancery, the Asiatic Department did not consider itself a part of
the Concert of Europe. Viewing the European nations as obstacles to its designs,
the Asiatic Department treated the European nations as irrelevant and, whenever
possible, sought to fulfill Russian goals through unilateral treaties or by wars
initiated without any reference to Europe. Since Europe insisted that issues
concerning the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire be settled in concert, frequent
conflicts were inevitable, while Russia’s outrage mounted at being thus thwarted
by powers it considered interlopers.
Partly defensive, partly offensive, Russian expansion was always ambiguous,
and this ambiguity generated Western debates over Russia’s true intentions that
lasted through the Soviet period. One reason for the perennial difficulty in
understanding Russia’s purposes was that the Russian government, even in the
communist period, always had more in common with an eighteenth-century
autocratic court than with a twentieth-century superpower. Neither imperial nor
communist Russia ever produced a great foreign minister. Like Nesselrode,
Gorchakov, Giers, Lamsdorff, and even Gromyko, its foreign ministers were all
accomplished and able but lacked the authority to design long-range policy.
They were little more than servants of a volatile and easily distracted autocrat,
for whose favor they had to compete amidst many overriding domestic concerns.
Imperial Russia had no Bismarck, no Salisbury, no Roosevelt—in short, no
hands-on minister with executive powers over all aspects of foreign affairs.
Even when the ruling tsar was a dominant personality, the autocratic system of
Russian policymaking inhibited the evolution of a coherent foreign policy. Once
the tsars found a foreign minister with whom they felt comfortable, they tended
to retain him into his dotage, as was the case with Nesselrode, Gorchakov, and
Giers. Among them, these three foreign ministers served for most of the
nineteenth century. Even in their extreme old age, they proved invaluable to
foreign statesmen, who considered them the only personalities worth seeing in
St. Petersburg because they were the only officials with access to the tsar.
Protocol prohibited virtually anybody else from seeking an audience with the
tsar.
To complicate decision-making further, the tsar’s executive power frequently
clashed with his aristocratic notions of princely life-style. For example,
immediately after the signing of the Reinsurance Treaty, a key period in Russia’s
foreign affairs, Alexander III left St. Petersburg for four consecutive months,
from July through October 1887, to go yachting, observe maneuvers, and visit
his in-laws in Denmark. With the only real decision-maker thus out of reach,
Russia’s foreign policy floundered. Not only were the tsar’s policies often driven
by the emotions of the moment, they were greatly influenced by the nationalist
agitation fanned by the military. Military adventurers, like General Kaufmann in
Central Asia, paid hardly any attention to the foreign ministers. Gorchakov was
probably telling the truth about how little he knew of Central Asia in his
conversations with the British ambassadors described in the previous chapter.
By the time of Nicholas II, who ruled from 1894 to 1917, Russia was forced
to pay the price for its arbitrary institutions. Nicholas first took Russia into a
disastrous war with Japan and then permitted his country to become captive to
an alliance system which made war with Germany virtually inevitable. While
Russia’s energies had been geared to expansion and consumed by attendant
foreign conflicts, its social and political structure had grown brittle. Defeat in the
war with Japan in 1905 should have served as a warning that the time for
domestic consolidation—as advocated by the great reformer, Peter Stolypin—
was drawing short. What Russia needed was a respite; what it received was
another foreign enterprise. Thwarted in Asia, Russia reverted to its dream of
Pan-Slavism and a push toward Constantinople, which, this time, ran out of
control.
The irony was that, after a certain point, expansionism no longer enhanced
Russia’s power but brought about its decline. In 1849, Russia was widely
considered the strongest nation in Europe. Seventy years later, its dynasty
collapsed and it temporarily disappeared from the ranks of the Great Powers.
Between 1848 and 1914, Russia was involved in over half a dozen wars (other
than colonial wars), far more than any other major power. In each of these
conflicts, except for the intervention in Hungary in 1849, the financial and
political costs to Russia far exceeded the possible gains. Though each of these
conflicts took its toll, Russia continued to identify Great Power status with
territorial expansion; it hungered for more land, which it neither needed nor was
able to digest. Tsar Nicholas II’s close adviser, Serge Witte, promised him that
“from the shores of the Pacific and the heights of the Himalayas Russia would
dominate not only the affairs of Asia but those of Europe as well.”6 Economic,
social, and political development would have been far more advantageous to
Great Power status in the Industrial Age than a satellite in Bulgaria or a
protectorate in Korea.
A few Russian leaders, such as Gorchakov, were wise enough to realize that,
for Russia, “the extension of territory was the extension of weakness,”7 but their
views were never able to moderate the Russian mania for new conquests. In the
end, the communist empire collapsed for essentially the same reasons that the
tsars’ had. The Soviet Union would have been much better off had it stayed
within its borders after the Second World War and established relations with
what came to be known as the satellite orbit comparable to those it maintained
with Finland.
When two colossi—a powerful, impetuous Germany and a huge, relentless
Russia—rub up against each other at the center of the Continent, conflict is
probable, no matter that Germany had nothing to gain from a war with Russia
and that Russia had everything to lose in a war with Germany. The peace of
Europe therefore depended on the one country that had played the role of
balancer so skillfully and with such moderation throughout the nineteenth
century.
In 1890, the term “splendid isolation” still accurately described British foreign
policy. British subjects proudly referred to their country as the “balance wheel”
of Europe—the weight of which prevented any one of the various coalitions
among the Continental powers from becoming dominant. Entanglement in these
alliances was traditionally nearly as repugnant to British statesmen as it was to
American isolationists. Yet only twenty-five years later, Englishmen would be
dying by the hundreds of thousands on the muddy fields of Flanders as they
fought at the side of a French ally against a German foe.
A remarkable change occurred in British foreign policy between 1890 and
1914. It was no small irony that the man who led Great Britain through the first
part of this transition represented everything traditional about Great Britain and
British foreign policy. For the Marquis of Salisbury was the ultimate insider. He
was the scion of the ancient Cecil family, whose ancestors had served as top
ministers to British monarchs since the time of Queen Elizabeth I. King Edward
VII, who reigned from 1901 to 1910 and came from an upstart family compared
with the Cecils, was known to complain occasionally at the condescending tone
Salisbury used toward him.
Salisbury’s rise in politics was as effortless as it was foreordained. After an
education at Christ Church, Oxford, the young Salisbury toured the Empire,
perfected his French, and met heads of state. By the age of forty-eight, after
serving as Secretary of State for India, he became Disraeli’s Foreign Minister
and played a major role at the Congress of Berlin, where he did most of the
detailed day-to-day negotiating. After Disraeli’s death, he took over the
leadership of the Tory Party and, apart from Gladstone’s last government of
1892–94, was the dominant figure in British politics during the last fifteen years
of the nineteenth century.
In some respects, Salisbury’s position was not unlike that of President George
Bush, though he served longer in his nation’s highest office. Both men bestrode a
world which was receding by the time they came to power, though that fact was
not obvious to either of them. Both left an impact by knowing how to operate
what they had inherited. Bush’s view of the world was shaped by the Cold War,
in which he had risen to prominence and over whose end he was obliged to
preside while at the pinnacle of his career; Salisbury’s formative experiences had
been in the Palmerston era of unparalleled British power overseas and of
intractable Anglo-Russian rivalry, both of which were clearly coming to an end
during his leadership.
Salisbury’s government had to grapple with the decline in Great Britain’s
relative standing. Its vast economic power was now matched by Germany’s;
Russia and France had expanded their imperial efforts and were challenging the
British Empire nearly everywhere. Though Great Britain was still preeminent,
the dominance it had enjoyed in the middle of the nineteenth century was
slipping. Just as Bush adjusted skillfully to what he had not foreseen, by the
1890s Great Britain’s leaders recognized the need to relate traditional policy to
unexpected realities.
Overweight and rumpled in his physical appearance, Lord Salisbury more
adequately embodied Great Britain’s contentment with the status quo than he did
its transformation. As the author of the phrase “splendid isolation,” Salisbury, on
the face of it, promised to carry on the traditional British policies of holding a
firm line overseas against other imperial powers, and of involving Great Britain
in Continental alliances only when it was required as a last resort to prevent an
aggressor from overturning the balance. For Salisbury, Great Britain’s insular
position meant that its ideal policy was to be active on the high seas and to
remain unentangled in the customary Continental alliances. “We are fish,” he
bluntly asserted on one occasion.
In the end, Salisbury was obliged to recognize that Great Britain’s
overextended empire was straining under the pressures of Russia in the Far and
Near East, and of France in Africa. Even Germany was entering the colonial
race. Though France, Germany, and Russia were frequently in conflict with one
another on the Continent, they always clashed with Great Britain overseas. For
Great Britain possessed not only India, Canada, and a large portion of Africa, but
insisted on dominating vast territories which, for strategic reasons, it wanted to
keep from falling into the hands of another power even though it did not seek to
control them directly. Salisbury called this claim a “sort of ear-mark upon
territory, which, in case of a breakup, England did not want any other power to
have.”8 These areas included the Persian Gulf, China, Turkey, and Morocco.
During the 1890s, Great Britain felt beleaguered by endless clashes with Russia
in Afghanistan, around the Straits, and in Northern China, and with France in
Egypt and Morocco.
With the Mediterranean Agreements of 1887, Great Britain became indirectly
associated with the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy in
the hope that Italy and Austria might strengthen its hand in dealing with France
in North Africa, and with Russia in the Balkans. Yet the Mediterranean
Agreements proved to be only a stopgap.
The new German empire, deprived of its master strategist, did not know what
to do with its opportunity. Geopolitical realities were gradually drawing Great
Britain out of its splendid isolation, though there was enough handwringing
about it by traditionalists. The first move toward greater involvement with the
Continent was on behalf of warmer relations with imperial Germany. Convinced
that Russia and Great Britain desperately needed Germany, German
policymakers thought they could drive a hard bargain with both of them
simultaneously without specifying the nature of the bargain they were seeking or
ever imagining that they might be pushing Russia and Great Britain closer
together. When rebuffed in these all-or-nothing overtures, German leaders would
withdraw into sulkiness, which quickly changed to truculence. This approach
was in sharp contrast to that of France, which settled for slow, step-by-step
progress, waiting twenty years for Russia and another decade and a half for
Great Britain to propose an agreement. For all the noise post-Bismarck Germany
made, its foreign policy was overwhelmingly amateurish, shortsighted, and even
timid when faced with the confrontations it had itself generated.
William II’s first diplomatic move along what turned into a fated course came
in 1890, shortly after he had dismissed Bismarck, when he rejected the Tsar’s
offer to renew the Reinsurance Treaty for another three-year term. By rejecting
Russia’s overture at the very beginning of his rule, the Kaiser and his advisers
pulled the perhaps most important thread out of the fabric of Bismarck’s system
of overlapping alliances. Three considerations motivated them: first, they wanted
to make their policy as “simple and transparent” as possible (the new Chancellor,
Caprivi, confessed on one occasion that he simply did not possess Bismarck’s
ability to keep eight balls in the air at once); second, they wanted to reassure
Austria that their alliance with it was their top priority; finally, they considered
the Reinsurance Treaty an obstacle to their preferred course of forging an
alliance with Great Britain.
Each of these considerations demonstrated the lack of geopolitical
understanding by which the Germany of William II progressively isolated itself.
Complexity was inherent in Germany’s location and history; no “simple” policy
could take account of its many aspects. It had been precisely the ambiguity of a
simultaneous treaty with Russia and an alliance with Austria that had enabled
Bismarck to act as a balancer between Austrian fears and Russian ambitions for
twenty years without having to break with either or to escalate the endemic
Balkan crises. Ending the Reinsurance Treaty brought about exactly the opposite
situation: limiting Germany’s options promoted Austrian adventurism. Nikolai
de Giers, the Russian Foreign Minister, understood this immediately, noting:
“Through the dissolution of our treaty [the Reinsurance Treaty], Vienna has been
liberated from the wise and well-meaning, but also stern control of Prince
Bismarck.”9
Abandoning the Reinsurance Treaty not only caused Germany to lose leverage
vis-ä-vis Austria, it above all increased Russia’s anxieties. Germany’s reliance
on Austria was interpreted in St. Petersburg as a new predisposition to support
Austria in the Balkans. Once Germany had positioned itself as an obstacle to
Russian aims in a region that had never before represented a vital German
interest, Russia was certain to search for a counterweight, which France was
only too eager to supply.
Russia’s temptations to move in France’s direction were strengthened by a
German colonial agreement with Great Britain, which swiftly followed the
Kaiser’s refusal to renew the Reinsurance Treaty. Great Britain acquired from
Germany the sources of the Nile and tracts of land in East Africa, including the
island of Zanzibar. As a quid pro quo, Germany received a relatively
inconsequential strip of land linking South-West Africa to the Zambezi River,
the socalled Caprivi Strip, and the island of Helgoland in the North Sea, which
was presumed to have some strategic value in safeguarding the German coast
from naval attack.
It was not a bad bargain for either side, though it turned into the first of a
series of misunderstandings. London undertook the agreement as a means of
settling African colonial issues; Germany saw it as a prelude to an AngloGerman alliance; and Russia, going even further, interpreted it as England’s first
step into the Triple Alliance. Thus Baron Staal, the Russian Ambassador to
Berlin, anxiously reported the pact between his country’s historic friend,
Germany, and its traditional foe, Great Britain, in these terms:
When one is united by numerous interests and positive engagements on one point of the globe, one is
almost certain to proceed in concert in all the great questions that may arise in the international
field…. Virtually the entente with Germany has been accomplished. It cannot help but react upon the
relations of England with the other powers of the Triple Alliance.10
Bismarck’s nightmare of coalitions was now in train, for the end of the
Reinsurance Treaty had paved the way for a Franco-Russian alliance.
Germany had calculated that France and Russia would never form an alliance,
because Russia had no interest in fighting for Alsace-Lorraine, and France had
no interest in fighting for the Balkan Slavs. It turned out to be one of the many
egregious misconceptions of imperial Germany’s post-Bismarck leadership.
Once Germany was irrevocably committed to Austria’s side, France and Russia
in fact needed each other, however divergent their goals, because neither could
achieve its own strategic objectives without first defeating, or at least
weakening, Germany. France needed to do so because Germany would never
relinquish Alsace-Lorraine without war, while Russia knew it would not be able
to inherit the Slavic parts of the Austrian Empire without defeating Austria—
which Germany had made clear it would resist by its refusal to renew the
Reinsurance Treaty. And Russia had no chance against Germany without the
assistance of France.
Within a year of Germany’s refusal to renew the Reinsurance Treaty, France
and Russia had signed their Entente Cordiale, which provided mutual diplomatic
support. Giers, the venerable Russian Foreign Minister, warned that the
agreement would not solve the fundamental problem that Great Britain, not
Germany, was Russia’s principal adversary. Desperate to escape the isolation to
which Bismarck had consigned it, France agreed to add a clause to the FrancoRussian agreement obliging France to give Russia diplomatic support in any
colonial conflict with Great Britain.
To French leaders, this anti-British clause seemed a small entrance fee to
establish what was bound to turn into an anti-German coalition. Thereafter,
French efforts would be directed at extending the Franco-Russian agreement into
a military alliance. Though Russian nationalists favored such a military pact to
speed the dismemberment of the Austrian Empire, Russian traditionalists were
uneasy. Giers’ eventual successor as Foreign Minister, Count Vladimir
Lamsdorff, wrote in his diary in early February 1892:
They (the French) are also preparing to besiege us with proposals for an agreement about joint
military actions in case of an attack by a third party…. But why overdo a good thing? We need peace
and quiet in view of the miseries of the famine, of the unsatisfactory state of our finances, of the
uncompleted state of our armaments program, of the desperate state of our transportation system, and
finally of the renewed activity in the camp of the nihilists.11
In the end, French leaders overcame Lamsdorff’s doubts, or else he was
overruled by the Tsar. In 1894, a military convention was signed in which France
agreed to aid Russia if Russia was attacked by Germany, or by Austria in
combination with Germany. Russia would support France in case of an attack by
Germany, or by Germany in combination with Italy. Whereas the Franco-
Russian Agreement of 1891 had been a diplomatic instrument and could
plausibly have been argued to be aimed at Great Britain as well as at Germany,
the sole adversary foreseen by this military convention was Germany. What
George Kennan would later call “the fateful alliance” (the entente between
France and Russia of 1891, followed by the military convention of 1894) marked
a watershed in Europe’s rush toward war.
It was the beginning of the end for the operation of the balance of power. The
balance of power works best if at least one of the following conditions pertains:
First, each nation must feel itself free to align with any other state, depending on
the circumstances of the moment. Through much of the eighteenth century, the
equilibrium was adjusted by constantly shifting alignments; it was also the case
in the Bismarck period until 1890. Second, when there are fixed alliances but a
balancer sees to it that none of the existing coalitions becomes predominant—the
situation after the Franco-Russian treaty, when Great Britain continued to act as
balancer and was in fact being wooed by both sides. Third, when there are rigid
alliances and no balancer exists, but the cohesion of the alliances is relatively
low so that, on any given issue, there are either compromises or changes in
alignment.
When none of these conditions prevails, diplomacy turns rigid. A zero sum
game develops in which any gain of one side is conceived as a loss for the other.
Armaments races and mounting tensions become inevitable. This was the
situation during the Cold War, and in Europe tacitly after Great Britain joined the
Franco-Russian alliance, thereby forming the Triple Entente starting in 1908.
Unlike during the Cold War, the international order after 1891 did not turn
rigid after a single challenge. It took fifteen years before each of the three
elements of flexibility was destroyed in sequence. After the formation of the
Triple Entente, the balance of power ceased to function. Tests of strength became
the rule and not the exception. Diplomacy as the art of compromise ended. It was
only a question of time before some crisis would drive events out of control.
But in 1891, as France and Russia lined up against it, Germany still hoped that
it could bring about the offsetting alliance with Great Britain for which William
II yearned but which his impetuousness made impossible. The colonial
agreement of 1890 did not lead to the alliance the Russian Ambassador had
feared. Its failure to materialize was partly due to British domestic politics.
When the aged Gladstone returned to office in 1892 for the last time, he bruised
the Kaiser’s tender ego by rejecting any association with autocratic Germany or
Austria.
Yet the fundamental reason for the failure of the several attempts to arrange an
Anglo-German alliance was the German leadership’s persistent incomprehension
of traditional British foreign policy as well as of the real requirements of its own
security. For a century and a half, Great Britain had refused to commit itself to
an open-ended military alliance. It would make only two kinds of engagements:
limited military agreements to deal with definable, clearly specified dangers; or
entente-type arrangements to cooperate diplomatically on those issues in which
interests with another country ran parallel. In a sense, the British definition of
entente was, of course, a tautology: Great Britain would cooperate when it chose
to cooperate. But an entente also had the effect of creating moral and
psychological ties and a presumption—if not a legal obligation—of joint action
in crises. And it would have kept Great Britain apart from France and Russia, or
at least complicated their rapprochement.
Germany refused such informal procedures. William II insisted on what he
called a Continental-type alliance. “If England wants allies or aid,” he said in
1895, “she must abandon her noncommittal policy and provide continental type
guarantees or treaties.”12 But what could the Kaiser have meant by a
Continental-type guarantee? After nearly a century of splendid isolation, Great
Britain was clearly not ready to undertake the permanent Continental
commitment it had so consistently avoided for 150 years, especially on behalf of
Germany, which was fast becoming the strongest country on the Continent.
What made this German pressure for a formal guarantee so self-defeating was
that Germany did not really need it, because it was strong enough to defeat any
prospective Continental adversary or combination of them, so long as Great
Britain did not take their side. What Germany should have asked of Great Britain
was not an alliance, but benevolent neutrality in a Continental war—and for that
an entente-type arrangement would have been sufficient. By asking for what it
did not need, and by offering what Great Britain did not want (sweeping
commitments to defend the British Empire), Germany led Great Britain to
suspect that it was in fact seeking world domination.
German impatience deepened the reserve of the British, who were beginning
to entertain grave doubts about the judgment of their suitor. “I do not like to
disregard the plain anxiety of my German friends,” wrote Salisbury. “But it is
not wise to be guided too much by their advice now. Their Achitophel is gone.
They are much pleasanter and easier to deal with; but one misses the
extraordinary penetration of the old man [Bismarck].”13
While the German leadership impetuously pursued alliances, the German
public was demanding an ever more assertive foreign policy. Only the Social
Democrats held out for a time, though in the end they, too, succumbed to public
opinion and supported Germany’s declaration of war in 1914. The leading
German classes had no experience with European diplomacy, much less with the
Weltpolitik on which they were so loudly insisting. The Junkers, who had led
Prussia to the domination of Germany, would bear the weight of opprobrium
after the two world wars, especially in the United States. In fact, they were the
social stratum least guilty of overreaching in foreign affairs, being basically
geared to Continental policy and having little interest in events outside Europe.
Rather, it was the new industrial managerial and the growing professional classes
that provided the nucleus of nationalist agitation without encountering in the
political system the sort of parliamentary buffer which had evolved in Great
Britain and France over several centuries. In the Western democracies, the strong
nationalist currents were channeled through parliamentary institutions; in
Germany, they had to find expression in extra-parliamentary pressure groups.
As autocratic as Germany was, its leaders were extremely sensitive to public
opinion and heavily influenced by nationalistic pressure groups. These groups
saw diplomacy and international relations almost as if they were sporting events,
always pushing the government to a harder line, more territorial expansion, more
colonies, a stronger army, or a larger navy. They treated the normal give-andtake of diplomacy, or the slightest hint of German diplomatic concession, as an
egregious humiliation. Kurt Rietzler, the political secretary of the German
Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, who was in office when war was
declared, remarked aptly: “The threat of war in our time lies… in the internal
politics of those countries in which a weak government is confronted by a strong
nationalist movement.”14
This emotional and political climate produced a major German diplomatic
gaffe—the socalled Krüger Telegram—by which the Emperor undermined his
option for a British alliance for at least the rest of the century. In 1895, a Colonel
Jameson, supported by British colonial interests and most notably by Cecil
Rhodes, led a raid into the independent Boer states of the South African
Transvaal. The raid was a total failure and a great embarrassment to Salisbury’s
government, which claimed to have had no direct involvement in it. The German
nationalist press gloated, urging an even more thorough humiliation of the
British.
Friedrich von Holstein, a principal councilor and éminence grise in the
Foreign Ministry, saw the disastrous raid as an opportunity to teach the British
the advantages of a friendly Germany by showing them just how prickly an
adversary it could be. For his own part, the Kaiser found the opportunity to
swagger irresistible. Shortly after New Year’s Day 1896, he dispatched a
message to President Paul Krüger of the Transvaal congratulating him for
repelling “the attacks from without.” It was a direct slap at Great Britain and
raised the specter of a German protectorate in the heart of what the British
regarded as their own sphere of interest. In reality, the Krüger Telegram
represented neither German colonial aspirations nor German foreign policy, for it
was purely a public-relations ploy and it achieved that objective: “Nothing that
the government has done for years,” wrote the liberal Allgemeine Zeitung on
January 5, “has given as complete satisfaction…. It is written from the soul of
the German people.”15
Germany’s shortsightedness and insensitivity accelerated this trend. The
Kaiser and his entourage convinced themselves that, since courting Great Britain
had failed to produce an alliance, perhaps some demonstration of the cost of
German displeasure would prove more persuasive. Unfortunately for Germany,
that approach belied the historical record, which offered no example of a British
susceptibility to being bullied.
What started out as a form of harassment to demonstrate the value of German
friendship gradually turned into a genuine strategic challenge. No issue was as
likely to turn Great Britain into an implacable adversary as a threat to its
command of the seas. Yet this was precisely what Germany undertook,
seemingly without realizing that it was embarking on an irrevocable challenge.
Starting in the mid-1890s, domestic pressures to build up a large German navy
began to mount, spearheaded by the “navalists,” one of a growing number of
pressure groups which consisted of a mix of industrialists and naval officers.
Since they developed a vested interest in tensions with Great Britain to justify
naval appropriations, they treated the Krüger Telegram as a godsend, as they did
any other issue denoting the possibility of conflict with Great Britain in remote
corners of the globe, ranging from the status of Samoa to the boundaries of the
Sudan and the future of the Portuguese colonies.
Thus began a vicious cycle which culminated in confrontation. For the
privilege of building a navy which, in the subsequent world war, had only one
inconclusive encounter with the British fleet in the battle of Jutland, Germany
managed to add Great Britain to its growing list of adversaries. For there was no
question that England would resist once a Continental country already in
possession of the strongest army in Europe began aiming for parity with Great
Britain on the seas.
Yet the Kaiser seemed oblivious to the impact of his policies. British irritation
with German bluster and the naval buildup did not, at first, change the reality
that France was pressing Great Britain in Egypt, and that Russia was challenging
it in Central Asia. What if Russia and France decided to cooperate, applying
simultaneous pressure in Africa, Afghanistan, and China? What if the Germans
joined them in an assault on the Empire in South Africa? British leaders began to
doubt whether splendid isolation was still an appropriate foreign policy.
The most important and vocal spokesman of this group was the Colonial
Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain. A dashing figure who was Salisbury’s junior by
a whole generation, Chamberlain seemed to embody the twentieth century in his
call for some alliance—preferably German—while the older patrician adhered
strictly to the isolationist impulse of the previous century. In a major speech in
November 1899, Chamberlain called for a “Teutonic” alliance, consisting of
Great Britain, Germany, and the United States.16 Chamberlain felt so strongly
about it that he transmitted his scheme to Germany without Salisbury’s approval.
But the German leaders continued to hold out for formal guarantees and
remained oblivious to the reality that the terms were irrelevant and that what
should have mattered to them most was British neutrality in a Continental war.
In October 1900, Salisbury’s poor health forced him to give up the office of
Foreign Secretary, though he retained the post of Prime Minister. His successor
at the Foreign Office was Lord Lansdowne, who agreed with Chamberlain that
Great Britain could no longer enjoy safety through splendid isolation. Yet
Lansdowne was unable to muster a consensus for a full-scale formal alliance
with Germany, the Cabinet being unwilling to go further than an entente-style
arrangement: “…an understanding with regard to the policy which they (the
British and the German governments) might pursue in reference to particular
questions or in particular parts of the world in which they are alike interested.”17
It was substantially the same formula which would lead to the Entente Cordiale
with France a few years later and which proved quite sufficient to bring Great
Britain into the World War on the side of France.
Once again, however, Germany rejected the attainable in favor of what was on
the face of it unachievable. The new German Chancellor Bülow refused an
entente-style arrangement with Great Britain because he was more worried about
public opinion than he was about geopolitical vistas—especially given his
priority of persuading the Parliament to vote a large increase in the German
navy. He would curtail the naval program for nothing less than British adherence
to a triple alliance consisting of Germany, Austria, and Italy. Salisbury rejected
Bülow’s all-or-nothing gambit, and, for the third time in a decade, an AngloGerman agreement aborted.
The essential incompatibility between British and German perceptions of
foreign policy could be seen in the way the two leaders explained their failure to
agree. Bülow was all emotion as he accused Great Britain of provincialism,
ignoring the fact that Great Britain had been conducting a global foreign policy
for over a century before Germany was even unified:
English politicians know little about the Continent. From a continental point of view they know as
much as we do about ideas in Peru or Siam. They are naive in their conscious egotism and in a
certain blind confidence. They find it difficult to credit really bad intentions in others. They are very
quiet, very phlegmatic and very optimistic—18
Salisbury’s reply took the form of a lesson in sophisticated strategic analysis for
his restless and rather vague interlocutor. Citing a tactless comment by the
German Ambassador to London, to the effect that Great Britain needed an
alliance with Germany in order to escape dangerous isolation, he wrote:
The liability of having to defend the German and Austrian frontiers against Russia is heavier than
that of having to defend the British Isles against France… Count Hatzfeldt [the German Ambassador]
speaks of our “isolation” as constituting a serious danger for us. Have we ever felt that danger
practically? If we had succumbed in the revolutionary war, our fall would not have been due to our
isolation. We had many allies, but they would not have saved us if the French Emperor had been able
to command the Channel. Except during his [Napoleon’s] reign we have never even been in danger;
and, therefore, it is impossible for us to judge whether the “isolation” under which we are supposed
to suffer, does or does not contain in it any elements of peril. It would hardly be wise to incur novel
and most onerous obligations, in order to guard against a danger in whose existence we have no
historical reason for believing.19
Great Britain and Germany simply did not have enough parallel interests to
justify the formal global alliance imperial Germany craved. The British feared
that further additions to German strength would turn their would-be ally into the
sort of dominant power they had historically resisted. At the same time,
Germany did not relish assuming the role of a British auxiliary on behalf of
issues traditionally considered peripheral to German interests, such as the threat
to India, and Germany was too arrogant to understand the benefits of British
neutrality.
Foreign Secretary Lansdowne’s next move demonstrated that the German
leaders’ conviction that their country was indispensable to Great Britain was a
case of inflated self-appraisal. In 1902, he stunned Europe by forging an alliance
with Japan, the first time since Richelieu’s dealings with the Ottoman Turks that
any European country had gone for help outside the Concert of Europe. Great
Britain and Japan agreed that if either of them became involved in a war with
one other power over China or Korea, the other would observe neutrality. If,
however, either signatory was attacked by two adversaries, the other signatory
was obliged to assist its partner. Because the alliance would operate only if Japan
were fighting two adversaries, Great Britain finally had discovered an ally which
was willing, indeed eager, to contain Russia without, however, seeking to
entangle it in extraneous arrangements—one, moreover, whose Far East location
placed it in an area of greater strategic interest to Great Britain than the RussoGerman frontier. And Japan was protected against France, which, without the
alliance, might have sought to use the war to strengthen its claims on Russian
support. From then on, Great Britain would lose interest in Germany as a
strategic partner; indeed, in the course of time, it would come to regard Germany
as a geopolitical threat.
As late as 1912, there was still a chance of settling Anglo-German difficulties.
Lord Haldane, first Lord of the Admiralty, visited Berlin to discuss a relaxation
of tensions. Haldane was instructed to seek an accommodation with Germany on
the basis of a naval accord along with this pledge of British neutrality: “If either
of the high contracting parties (i.e., Britain and Germany) becomes entangled in
a war in which it cannot be said to be the aggressor, the other will at least
observe towards the Power so entangled a benevolent neutrality.”20 The Kaiser,
however, insisted that England pledge neutrality “should war be forced upon
Germany,”21 which sounded to London like a demand that Great Britain stand on
the sidelines if Germany decided to launch a preemptive war against Russia or
France. When the British refused to accept the Kaiser’s wording, he in turn
rejected theirs; the German Navy Bill went forward, and Haldane returned to
London empty-handed.
The Kaiser still had not grasped that Great Britain would not go beyond a tacit
bargain, which was really all that Germany needed. “If England only intends to
extend her hand to us under the condition that we must limit our fleet,” he wrote,
“that is an unbounded impudence which contains in it a bad insult to the German
people and their Emperor. This offer must be rejected a limine…,”22 As
convinced as ever that he could intimidate England into a formal alliance, the
Kaiser boasted: “I have shown the English that, when they touch our armaments,
they bite on granite. Perhaps by this I have increased their hatred but won their
respect, which will induce them in due course to resume negotiations, it is to be
hoped in a more modest tone and with a more fortunate result.”23
The Kaiser’s impetuous and imperious quest for alliance merely succeeded in
magnifying Great Britain’s suspicions. The German naval program on top of
German harassment of Great Britain during the Boer War of 1899–1902 led to a
thorough reassessment of British foreign policy. For a century and a half, Great
Britain had considered France as the principal threat to the European
equilibrium, to be resisted with the assistance of some German state, usually
with Austria, occasionally with Prussia. And it had viewed Russia as the gravest
danger to its empire. But once it had the Japanese alliance in hand, Great Britain
began to reconsider its historic priorities. In 1903, Great Britain initiated a
systematic effort to settle outstanding colonial issues with France, culminating in
the socalled Entente Cordiale of 1904—precisely the sort of arrangement for
informal cooperation that Germany had consistently rejected. Almost
immediately afterward, Great Britain began to explore a similar arrangement
with Russia.
Because the Entente was formally a colonial agreement, it did not represent a
technical break with the traditional British policy of “splendid isolation.” Yet its
practical effect was that Great Britain abandoned the position of balancer and
attached itself to one of the two opposing alliances. In July 1903, when the
Entente was being negotiated, a French representative in London told
Lansdowne as a quid pro quo that France would do its utmost to relieve Great
Britain of Russian pressures elsewhere:
…that the most serious menace to the peace of Europe lay in Germany, that a good understanding
between France and England was the only means of holding German designs in check, and that if
such an understanding could be arrived at, England would find that France would be able to exercise
a salutary influence over Russia and thereby relieve us from many of our troubles with that country.24
Within a decade, Russia, previously tied to Germany by the Reinsurance Treaty,
had become a military ally of France, while Great Britain, an on-again-off-again
suitor of Germany, joined the French diplomatic camp. Germany had achieved
the extraordinary feat of isolating itself and of bringing together three erstwhile
enemies in a hostile coalition aimed against it.
A statesman aware of approaching danger has to make a basic decision. If he
believes that the threat will mount with the passage of time, he must try to nip it
in the bud. But if he concludes that the looming danger reflects a fortuitous, if
accidental, combination of circumstances, he is usually better off waiting and
letting time erode the peril. Two hundred years earlier, Richelieu had recognized
the danger in the hostile encirclement of France—indeed, avoiding it was the
core of his policy. But he understood as well the various components of that
potential danger. He decided that premature action would drive the states
surrounding France together. Thus he made time his ally and waited for the
latent differences among France’s adversaries to emerge. Then, and only after
these had become entrenched, did he permit France to enter the fray.
The Kaiser and his advisers had neither the patience nor the acumen for such a
policy—even though the countries by which Germany felt threatened were
anything but natural allies. Germany’s reaction to the looming encirclement was
to accelerate the same diplomacy which had brought about the danger in the first
place. It tried to split the young Entente Cordiale by finding some pretext to face
down France, thereby demonstrating that British support was either illusory or
ineffective.
Germany’s opportunity to test the strength of the Entente presented itself in
Morocco, where French designs were in violation of a treaty affirming
Morocco’s independence, and where Germany had substantial commercial
interests. The Kaiser chose to make his point while on a cruise in March 1905.
Landing at Tangier, he declared Germany’s resolve to uphold the independence
of Morocco. The German leaders were gambling, first, that the United States,
Italy, and Austria would support their open-door policy, second, that in the
aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War, Russia would not be able to involve itself,
and third, that Great Britain would be only too happy to be relieved of its
obligation to France at an international conference.
All of these assumptions were proved wrong because fear of Germany
overrode every other consideration. In the first challenge to the Entente Cordiale,
Great Britain backed France to the hilt and would not go along with Germany’s
call for a conference until France had accepted it. Austria and Italy were
reluctant to venture anywhere near the brink of war. Nevertheless, German
leaders invested a huge amount of prestige in this growing dispute, on the
reasoning that anything less than a diplomatic victory demonstrating the
irrelevance of the Entente would be disastrous.
Throughout his reign, the Kaiser was better at starting crises than he was at
concluding them. He found dramatic encounters exciting but lacked the nerve for
prolonged confrontation. William II and his advisers were correct in their
assessment that France was not prepared to go to war. But, as it turned out,
neither were they. All they really achieved was the dismissal of French Foreign
Minister Delcassé, a token victory because Delcassé soon returned in another
position, retaining a major role in French politics. In terms of the substance of
the dispute, the German leaders, lacking the courage of their boastful rhetoric,
permitted themselves to be fobbed off with a conference scheduled in six
months’ time in the Spanish town of Algeciras. When a country threatens war
and then backs down in favor of a conference to be held at some later date, it
automatically diminishes the credibility of its threat. (This was also the way the
Western democracies would defuse Khrushchev’s Berlin ultimatum a half
century later.) The extent to which Germany had isolated itself became evident
at the opening of the Algeciras Conference in January 1906. Edward Grey, the
Foreign Secretary of Great Britain’s new Liberal government, warned the
German Ambassador to London that, in the event of war, Great Britain would
stand alongside France:
…in the event of an attack upon France by Germany arising out of our Morocco Agreement, public
feeling in England would be so strong that no British government could remain neutral…25
The German leaders’ emotionalism and inability to define long-range objectives
turned Algeciras into a diplomatic debacle for their country. The United States,
Italy, Russia, and Great Britain all refused to take Germany’s side. The results of
this first Moroccan crisis were the exact opposite of what German leaders had
sought to achieve. Instead of wrecking the Entente Cordiale, it led to FrancoBritish military cooperation and lent impetus to the Anglo-Russian Entente of
1907.
After Algeciras, Great Britain agreed to the military cooperation with a
Continental power that it had avoided for so long. Consultations began between
the leaders of the British and French navies. The Cabinet was not at ease with
this new departure. Grey wrote to Paul Cambon, the French Ambassador to
London, in an effort to hedge his bets:
We have agreed that consultation between experts is not, and ought not to be, regarded as an
engagement that commits either Government to action in a contingency that has not arisen and may
never arise….26
It was the traditional British escape clause that London not commit itself legally
to specific circumstances in which it would be obliged to take military action.
France accepted this sop to parliamentary control, convinced that military staff
talks would wield their own reality, whatever the legal obligation. For a decade
and a half, German leaders had refused to grant Great Britain this sort of leeway.
The French had the political acumen to live with British ambiguity, and to rely
on the conviction that a moral obligation was developing which, in a time of
crisis, might well carry the day.
With the emergence of the Anglo-French-Russian bloc of 1907, only two
forces remained in play in European diplomacy: the Triple Entente and the
alliance between Germany and Austria. German encirclement became complete.
Like the Anglo-French Entente, the British agreement with Russia began as a
colonial accord. For some years, Great Britain and Russia had been slowly
putting their colonial disputes to rest. Japan’s victory over Russia in 1905
effectively ruined Russia’s Far Eastern ambitions. By the summer of 1907, it
became safe for Great Britain to offer Russia generous terms in Afghanistan and
Persia, dividing Persia into three spheres of influence: the Russians were given
the northern region; a central region was declared neutral; and Great Britain
claimed control of the south. Afghanistan went to the British sphere. AngloRussian relations, which ten years earlier had been marred by disputes covering
a third of the globe from Constantinople to Korea, were finally serene. The
degree of British preoccupation with Germany was shown by the fact that, to
secure Russian cooperation, Great Britain was prepared to abandon its
determination to keep Russia out of the Dardanelles. As Foreign Secretary Grey
remarked: “Good relations with Russia meant that our old policy of closing the
Straits against her, and throwing our weight against her at any conference of the
Powers must be abandoned.”27
Some historians28 have claimed that the real Triple Entente was two colonial
agreements gone awry, and that Great Britain had wanted to protect its empire,
not to encircle Germany. There is a classic document, however, the socalled
Crowe Memorandum, which leaves no reasonable doubt that Great Britain
joined the Triple Entente in order to thwart what it feared was a German drive
for world domination. On January 1, 1907, Sir Eyre Crowe, a prominent British
Foreign Office analyst, explained why, in his view, an accommodation with
Germany was impossible and entente with France was the only option. The
Crowe Memorandum was at a level of analysis never reached by any document
of post-Bismarck Germany. The conflict had become one between strategy and
brute power—and unless there is a huge disproportion of strength, which was
not the case, the strategist has the upper hand because he can plan his actions
while his adversary is obliged to improvise. Admitting to major differences
between Great Britain and both France and Russia, Crowe nevertheless assessed
these as being subject to compromise because they reflected definable, and
therefore limited, objectives. What made German foreign policy so menacing
was the lack of any discernible rationale behind its ceaseless global challenges,
which extended across regions as far-flung as South Africa, Morocco, and the
Near East. In addition, the German drive for maritime power was “incompatible
with the survival of the British Empire.”
According to Crowe, Germany’s unconstrained conduct guaranteed
confrontation: “The union of the greatest military with the greatest naval power
in one state would compel the world to combine for the riddance of such an
incubus.”29
True to the tenets of Realpolitik, Crowe argued that structure, not motive,
determined stability: Germany’s intentions were essentially irrelevant; what
mattered were its capabilities. He put forward two hypotheses:
Either Germany is definitely aiming at a general political hegemony and maritime ascendancy,
threatening the independence of her neighbours and ultimately the existence of England; Or
Germany, free from any such clearcut ambition, and thinking for the present merely of using her
legitimate position and influence as one of the leading Powers in the council of nations, is seeking to
promote her foreign commerce, spread the benefits of German culture, extend the scope of her
national energies, and create fresh German interests all over the world wherever and whenever a
peaceful opportunity offers….30
Crowe insisted that these distinctions were irrelevant because, in the end, they
would be overridden by the temptations inherent in Germany’s growing power:
…it is clear that the second scheme (of semi-independent evolution, not entirely unaided by
statecraft) may at any stage merge into the first, or conscious-design scheme. Moreover, if ever the
evolution scheme should come to be realized, the position thereby accruing to Germany would
obviously constitute as formidable a menace to the rest of the world as would be presented by any
deliberate conquest of a similar position by ‘malice aforethought’.31
Though the Crowe Memorandum did not actually go further than to oppose an
understanding with Germany, its thrust was clear: if Germany did not abandon
its quest for maritime supremacy and moderate its socalled Weltpolitik, Great
Britain was certain to join Russia and France in opposing it. And it would do so
with the implacable tenacity that had brought down French and Spanish
pretensions in previous centuries.
Great Britain made it clear that it would not stand for any further accretion of
German strength. In 1909, Foreign Secretary Grey made this point in response to
a German offer to slow down (but not end) its naval buildup if Great Britain
agreed to stay neutral in a German war against France and Russia. The proposed
agreement, argued Grey,
…would serve to establish German hegemony in Europe and would not last long after it had served
that purpose. It is in fact an invitation to help Germany to make a European combination which could
be directed against us when it suited her to use it…. If we sacrifice the other Powers to Germany, we
shall eventually be attacked.32
After the creation of the Triple Entente, the cat-and-mouse game Germany and
Great Britain had played in the 1890s grew deadly serious and turned into a
struggle between a status quo power and a power demanding a change in the
equilibrium. With diplomatic flexibility no longer possible, the only way to alter
the balance of power was by adding more arms or by victory in war.
The two alliances were facing each other across a gulf of growing mutual
distrust. Unlike the period of the Cold War, the two groupings did not fear war;
they were in fact more concerned with preserving their cohesiveness than with
avoiding a showdown. Confrontation became the standard method of diplomacy.
Nevertheless, there was still a chance to avoid catastrophe because there were
actually few issues that justified war dividing the alliances. No other member of
the Triple Entente would have gone to war to help France regain AlsaceLorraine; Germany, even in its exalted frame of mind, was unlikely to support an
Austrian war of aggression in the Balkans. A policy of restraint might have
delayed the war and caused the unnatural alliances gradually to disintegrate—
especially as the Triple Entente had been forged by fear of Germany in the first
place.
By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the balance of power
had degenerated into hostile coalitions whose rigidity was matched by the
reckless disregard for consequence with which they had been assembled. Russia
was tied to a Serbia teeming with nationalist, even terrorist, factions and which,
having nothing to lose, had no concern for the risk of a general war. France had
handed a blank check to a Russia eager to restore its self-respect after the RussoJapanese War. Germany had done the same for an Austria desperate to protect its
Slavic provinces against agitation from Serbia, which, in turn, was backed by
Russia. The nations of Europe had permitted themselves to become captives of
reckless Balkan clients. Far from restraining these nations of unbounded passion
and limited sense of global responsibility, they allowed themselves to be dragged
along by the paranoia that their restless partners might shift alliances if they
were not given their way. For a few years, crises were still being surmounted
although each new one brought the inevitable showdown closer. And Germany’s
reaction to the Triple Entente revealed a dogged determination to repeat the same
mistake over and over again; every problem became transformed into a test of
manhood to prove that Germany was decisive and powerful while its adversaries
lacked resolution and strength. Yet, with each new German challenge, the bonds
of the Triple Entente grew tighter.
In 1908, an international crisis occurred over Bosnia-Herzegovina, worth
retelling because it illustrates the tendency of history to repeat itself. BosniaHerzegovina had been the backwater of Europe, its fate having been left in an
ambiguous status at the Congress of Berlin because no one really knew what to
do with it. This no-man’s-land between the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires,
which contained Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Muslim religions, and
Croatian, Serbian, and Muslim populations, had never been a state or even selfgoverning. It only seemed governable if none of these groups was asked to
submit to the others. For thirty years, Bosnia-Herzegovina had been under
Turkish suzerainty, Austrian administration, and local autonomy without
experiencing a serious challenge to this multinational arrangement which left the
issue of ultimate sovereignty unsettled. Austria had waited thirty years to initiate
outright annexation because the passions of the polyglot mix were too complex
even for the Austrians to sort out, despite their long experience of administering
in the midst of chaos. When they finally did annex Bosnia-Herzegovina, they did
so more to score a point against Serbia (and indirectly Russia) than to achieve
any coherent political objective. As a result, Austria upset the delicate balance of
offsetting hatreds.
Three generations later, in 1992, the same elemental passions erupted over
comparable issues, confounding all but the zealots directly involved and those
familiar with the region’s volatile history. Once more, an abrupt change in
government turned Bosnia-Herzegovina into a cauldron. As soon as Bosnia was
declared an independent state, all the nationalities fell upon each other in a
struggle for dominance, with the Serbs settling old scores in a particularly brutal
manner.
Taking advantage of Russia’s weakness in the wake of the Russo-Japanese
War, Austria frivolously implemented a thirty-year-old secret codicil from the
Congress of Berlin in which the powers had agreed to let Austria annex BosniaHerzegovina. Heretofore, Austria had been satisfied with de facto control
because it wanted no more Slavic subjects. But in 1908, Austria reversed that
decision, fearing its empire was about to dissolve under the impact of Serbian
agitation and thinking that it needed some success to demonstrate its continued
preeminence in the Balkans. In the intervening three decades, Russia had lost its
dominant position in Bulgaria and the Three Emperors’ League had lapsed. Not
unreasonably, Russia was outraged that the all-but-forgotten agreement should
now be invoked to permit Austria to acquire a territory which a Russian war had
liberated.
But outrage does not guarantee success, especially when its target is already in
possession of the prize. For the first time, Germany placed itself squarely behind
Austria, signaling that it was prepared to risk a European war if Russia
challenged the annexation. Then, making matters even more tense, Germany
demanded formal Russian and Serbian recognition of Austria’s move. Russia
had to swallow this humiliation because Great Britain and France were not yet
ready to go to war over a Balkan issue, and because Russia was in no position to
go to war all alone so soon after its defeat in the Russo-Japanese War.
Germany thus placed itself as an obstacle in Russia’s path and in an area
where it had never before asserted a vital interest—indeed, where Russia had
heretofore been able to count on Germany to moderate Austria’s ambitions.
Germany demonstrated not only its recklessness but a severe lapse of historical
memory. Only half a century before, Bismarck had accurately predicted that
Russia would never forgive Austria for humiliating it in the Crimean War. Now,
Germany was making the same mistake, compounding Russia’s estrangement,
which had started at the Congress of Berlin.
Humiliating a great country without weakening it is always a dangerous game.
Though Germany thought it was teaching Russia the importance of German
goodwill, Russia resolved never to be caught flat-footed again. The two great
Continental powers thus began to play a game called “chicken” in American
slang, in which two drivers hurtle their vehicles toward each other, each hoping
that the other will veer off at the last moment while counting on his own more
steady nerves. Unfortunately, this game was played on several different
occasions in pre-World War I Europe. Each time a collision was avoided, the
collective confidence in the game’s ultimate safety was strengthened, causing
everyone to forget that a single failure would produce irrevocable catastrophe.
As if Germany wanted to make perfectly sure that it had not neglected to bully
any potential adversary or to give all of them sufficient reason to tighten their
bonds to each other in self-defense, it next challenged France. In 1911, France,
now effectively the civil administrator of Morocco, responded to local unrest by
sending troops to the city of Fez, in clear violation of the Algeciras accord. To
the wild applause of the nationalist German press, the Kaiser reacted by
dispatching the gunboat Panther to the Moroccan port of Agadir. “Hurrah! A
Deed!” wrote the Rheinisch-Westfälische Zeitung on July 2, 1911. “Action at
last, a liberating deed which must dissolve the cloud of pessimism
everywhere.”33 The Münchener Neueste Nachrichten advised that the
government push ahead with every energy, “even if out of such a policy,
circumstances arise that we cannot foresee today.”34 In what passed for subtlety
in the German press, the journal was basically urging Germany to risk war over
Morocco.
The grandiloquently named “Panther Leap” had the same ending as
Germany’s previous efforts to break its self-inflicted encirclement. Once again,
Germany and France seemed poised on the brink of a war, with Germany’s goals
as ill-defined as ever. What sort of compensation was it seeking this time? A
Moroccan port? Part of Morocco’s Atlantic coast? Colonial gains elsewhere? It
wanted to intimidate France but could find no operational expression for that
objective.
In keeping with their evolving relationship, Great Britain backed France more
firmly than it had at Algeciras in 1906. The shift in British public opinion was
demonstrated by the attitude of its then Chancellor of the Exchequer, David
Lloyd George, who had a well-deserved reputation for pacifism and as an
advocate of good relations with Germany. On this occasion, however, he
delivered a major speech which warned that if
…a situation were to be forced upon us in which peace could only be preserved by the surrender of
the great and beneficent position we had won by centuries of heroism and achievement… then I say
emphatically that peace at that price would be a humiliation intolerable for a great country like ours
to endure.35
Even Austria turned a cold shoulder on its powerful ally, seeing no point in
staking its survival on a North African adventure. Germany backed down,
accepting a large but worthless tract of land in Central Africa, a transaction
which elicited a groan from Germany’s nationalistic press. “We practically
risked a world war for a few Congolese swamps,” wrote the Berliner Tageblatt
on November 3, 1911.36 Yet what ought to have been criticized was not the value
of the new acquisitions but the wisdom of threatening a different country with
war every few years without being able to define a meaningful objective, each
time magnifying the fear which had brought the hostile coalitions into being in
the first place.
If German tactics had by now become stereotyped, so had the Anglo-French
response. In 1912, Great Britain, France, and Russia started military staff talks,
the significance of which was only formally limited by the usual British
disclaimer that they constituted no legally binding commitment. Even this
constraint was belied to some extent by the Anglo-French Naval Treaty of 1912,
according to which the French fleet was moved to the Mediterranean and Great
Britain assumed responsibility for defending the French Atlantic coast. Two
years later, this agreement would be invoked as a moral obligation for Great
Britain to enter the First World War because, so it was claimed, France had left
its Channel coast undefended in reliance on British support. (Twenty-eight years
later, in 1940, a similar agreement between the United States and Great Britain
would enable Great Britain to move its Pacific fleet to the Atlantic, implying a
moral obligation on the part of the United States to protect Great Britain’s
nearby defenseless Asian possessions against Japanese attack.) In 1913, German
leaders culminated the alienation of Russia by another of their fitful and
pointless maneuvers. This time, Germany agreed to reorganize the Turkish army
and to send a German general to assume command over Constantinople. William
II dramatized the challenge by sending off the training mission with a typically
grandiloquent flourish, expressing his hope that “the German flags will soon fly
over the fortifications of the Bosphorus.”37
Few events could have enraged Russia more than Germany’s laying claim to
the position in the Straits that Europe had denied to Russia for a century. Russia
had with difficulty reconciled itself to the control of the Straits by a weak
country like Ottoman Turkey, but it would never acquiesce to domination of the
Dardanelles by another Great Power. The Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei
Sazonov, wrote to the Tsar in December 1913: “To abandon the Straits to a
powerful state would be synonymous with subordinating the whole economic
development of southern Russia to this state.”38 Nicholas II told the British
Ambassador that “Germany was aiming at acquiring such a position at
Constantinople as would enable it to shut in Russia altogether in the Black Sea.
Should she attempt to carry out this policy, he would have to resist it with all his
power, even if war should be the only alternative.”39
Though Germany devised a face-saving formula for removing the German
commander from Constantinople (by promoting him to field marshal, which,
according to German tradition, meant he could no longer command troops in the
field), irreparable damage had been done. Russia understood that Germany’s
support to Austria over Bosnia-Herzegovina had not been an aberration. The
Kaiser, regarding these developments as tests of his manhood, told his chancellor
on February 25, 1914: “Russo-Prussian relations are dead once and for all! We
have become enemies!”40 Six months later, World War I broke out.
An international system had evolved whose rigidity and confrontational style
paralleled that of the later Cold War. But in fact, the pre-World War I
international order was far more volatile than the Cold War world. In the Nuclear
Age, only the United States and the Soviet Union had the technical means to
start a general war in which the risks were so cataclysmic that neither
superpower dared to delegate such awesome power to an ally, however close. By
contrast, prior to World War I, each member of the two main coalitions was in a
position not only to start a war but to blackmail its allies into supporting it.
For a while, the alliance system itself provided a certain restraint. France held
Russia back in conflicts which primarily involved Austria; Germany played a
similar role with Austria vis-à-vis Russia. In the Bosnian crisis of 1908, France
made it clear that it would not go to war over a Balkan issue. During the
Moroccan crisis of 1911, French President Calliaux was told firmly that any
French attempt to resolve a colonial crisis by force would not receive Russian
support. As late as the Balkan War of 1912, Germany warned Austria that there
were limits to German backing, and Great Britain pressured Russia to moderate
its acts on behalf of the volatile and unpredictable Balkan League, which was led
by Serbia. At the London Conference of 1913, Great Britain helped to thwart
Serbian annexation of Albania, which would have been intolerable to Austria.
The London Conference of 1913 would, however, be the last time that the preWorld War I international system could ease conflicts. Serbia was unhappy with
Russia’s lukewarm support, while Russia resented Great Britain’s posture as an
impartial arbiter and France’s clear reluctance to go to war. Austria, on the verge
of disintegrating under Russian and South Slav pressures, was upset that
Germany was not backing it more vigorously. Serbia, Russia, and Austria all
expected greater support from their allies; France, Great Britain, and Germany
feared that they might lose their partners if they did not support them more
forcefully in the next crisis.
Afterward, each Great Power was suddenly seized by panic that a conciliatory
stance would make it appear weak and unreliable and cause its partners to leave
it facing a hostile coalition all alone. Countries began to assume levels of risk
unwarranted by their historic national interests or by any rational long-term
strategic objective. Richelieu’s dictum that means must correspond to ends was
violated almost daily. Germany accepted the risk of world war in order to be
seen as supportive of Vienna’s South Slav policy, in which it had no national
interest. Russia was willing to risk a fight to the death with Germany in order to
be viewed as Serbia’s steadfast ally. Germany and Russia had no major conflict
with each other; their confrontation was by proxy.
In 1912, the new French President, Raymond Poincaré, informed the Russian
Ambassador with respect to the Balkans that “if Russia goes to war, France will
also, as we know that in this question Germany is behind Austria.”41 The gleeful
Russian Ambassador reported “a completely new French view” that “the
territorial grabs by Austria affect the general European balance and therefore
France’s interests.”42 That same year, the British Undersecretary in the Foreign
Office, Sir Arthur Nicholson, wrote to the British Ambassador in St. Petersburg:
“I do not know how much longer we shall be able to follow our present policy of
dancing on a tight rope, and not be compelled to take some definite line or other.
I am also haunted by the same fear as you—lest Russia should become tired of
us and strike a bargain with Germany.”43
Not to be outdone in recklessness, the Kaiser promised Austria in 1913 that, in
the next crisis, Germany would follow it into war if necessary. On July 7, 1914,
the German Chancellor explained the policy which, less than four weeks later,
would lead to actual war: “If we urge them [the Austrians] ahead, then they will
say we pushed them in; if we dissuade them, then it will become a matter of our
leaving them in the lurch. Then they will turn to the Western Powers, whose
arms are wide open, and we will lose our last ally, such as it is.”44 The precise
benefit Austria was to draw from an alliance with the Triple Entente was left
undefined. Nor was it likely that Austria could join a grouping containing
Russia, which sought to undermine Austria’s Balkan position. Historically,
alliances had been formed to augment a nation’s strength in case of war; as
World War I approached, the primary motive for war was to strengthen the
alliances.
The leaders of all the major countries simply did not grasp the implications of
the technology at their disposal, or of the coalitions they were feverishly
constructing. They seemed oblivious to the huge casualties of the still relatively
recent American Civil War, and expected a short, decisive conflict. It never
occurred to them that the failure to make their alliances correspond to rational
political objectives would lead to the destruction of civilization as they knew it.
Each alliance had too much at stake to permit the traditional Concert of Europe
diplomacy to work. Instead, the Great Powers managed to construct a diplomatic
doomsday machine, though they were unaware of what they had done.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Into the Vortex: The Military Doomsday
Machine
The astonishing aspect of the outbreak of the First World War is not that a
crisis simpler than many already surmounted had finally triggered a global
catastrophe, but that it took so long for it to happen. By 1914, the confrontation
between Germany and Austria-Hungary on the one side, and the Triple Entente
on the other, had turned deadly earnest. The statesmen of all the major countries
had helped to construct the diplomatic doomsday mechanism that made each
succeeding crisis progressively more difficult to solve. Their military chiefs had
vastly compounded the peril by adding strategic plans which compressed the
time available for decision-making. Since the military plans depended on speed
and the diplomatic machinery was geared to its traditional leisurely pace, it
became impossible to disentangle the crisis under intense time pressure. To make
matters worse, the military planners had not adequately explained the
implications of their handiwork to their political colleagues.
Military planning had, in effect, become autonomous. The first step in this
direction occurred during the negotiation for a Franco-Russian military alliance
in 1892. Up to that time, alliance negotiations had been about the casus belli, or
what specific actions by the adversary might oblige allies to go to war. Almost
invariably, its definition hinged on who was perceived to have initiated the
hostilities.
In May 1892, the Russian negotiator, Adjutant General Nikolai Obruchev, sent
a letter to his Foreign Minister, Giers, explaining why the traditional method for
defining the casus belli had been overtaken by modern technology. Obruchev
argued that what mattered was who mobilized first, not who fired the first shot:
“The undertaking of mobilization can no longer be considered as a peaceful act;
on the contrary, it represents the most decisive act of war.”1
The side that procrastinated in mobilizing would lose the benefit of its
alliances and enable its enemy to defeat each adversary in turn. The need for all
the allies to mobilize simultaneously had become so urgent in the minds of
European leaders that it turned into the keystone of solemn diplomatic
engagements. The purpose of alliances was no longer to guarantee support after
a war had started, but to guarantee that each ally would mobilize as soon as and,
it was hoped, just before, any adversary did. When alliances so constructed
confronted each other, threats based on mobilization became irreversible because
stopping mobilization in midstream was more disastrous than not having started
it at all. If one side stopped while the other proceeded, it would be at a growing
disadvantage with every passing day. If both sides tried to stop simultaneously, it
would be technically so difficult that almost certainly the mobilization would be
completed before the diplomats could agree on how to arrest it.
This doomsday procedure effectively removed the casus belli from political
control. Every crisis had a built-in escalator to war—the decision to mobilize—
and every war was certain to become general.
Far from deploring the prospect of automatic escalation, Obruchev welcomed
it enthusiastically. The last thing he wanted was a local conflict. For, if Germany
were to stay out of a war between Russia and Austria, it would simply emerge
afterward in a position to dictate the terms of the peace. In Obruchev’s fantasy,
this was what Bismarck had done at the Congress of Berlin:
Less than any other can our diplomacy count on an isolated conflict of Russia, for example, with
Germany, or Austria, or Turkey alone. The Congress of Berlin was lesson enough for us in this
connection, and it taught us whom we should regard as our most dangerous enemy—the one who
fights with us directly or the one who waits for our weakening and then dictates the terms of
peace?…2
According to Obruchev, it was in Russia’s interest to make certain that every war
would be general. The benefit to Russia of a well-constructed alliance with
France would be to prevent the possibility of a localized war:
At the outset of every European war there is always a great temptation for the diplomats to localize
the conflict and to limit its effects as far as possible. But in the present armed and agitated condition
of continental Europe, Russia must regard any such localization of the war with particular
skepticism, because this could unduly strengthen the possibilities not only for those of our enemies
who are hesitating and have not come out into the open, but also for vacillating allies.3
In other words, a defensive war for limited objectives was against Russia’s
national interest. Any war had to be total, and the military planners could grant
no other option to the political leaders:
Once we have been drawn into a war, we cannot conduct that war otherwise than with all our forces,
and against both our neighbors. In the face of the readiness of entire armed peoples to go to war, no
other sort of war can be envisaged than the most decisive sort—a war that would determine for long
into the future the relative political positions of the European powers, and especially of Russia and
Germany.4
However trivial the cause, war would be total; if its prelude involved only one
neighbor, Russia should see to it that the other was drawn in. Almost
grotesquely, the Russian general staff preferred to fight Germany and AustriaHungary jointly than just one of them. A military convention carrying out
Obruchev’s ideas was signed on January 4, 1894. France and Russia agreed to
mobilize together should any member of the Triple Alliance mobilize for any
reason whatsoever. The doomsday machine was complete. Should Germany’s
ally, Italy, mobilize against France over Savoy, for instance, Russia would have
to mobilize against Germany; if Austria mobilized against Serbia, France was
now obliged to mobilize against Germany. Since it was virtually certain that at
some point some nation would mobilize for some cause, it was only a matter of
time before a general war broke out, for it required only one mobilization by a
major power to start the doomsday machinery for all of them.
At least Tsar Alexander III understood that the game now being played was
for the highest stakes. When Giers asked him, “…what would we gain by
helping the French destroy Germany?” he replied: “What we would gain would
be that Germany, as such, would disappear. It would break up into a number of
small, weak states, the way it used to be.”5 German war aims were equally
sweeping and nebulous. The much-invoked European equilibrium had turned
into a battle to the death, though not one of the statesmen involved could have
explained what cause justified such nihilism or what political aims would be
served by the conflagration.
What Russian planners were putting forward as theory, the German general
staff translated into operational planning at almost the exact moment that
Obruchev was negotiating the Franco-Russian military alliance. And with
German thoroughness, the imperial generals pushed the mobilization concept to
its absolute extreme. The chief of the German staff, Alfred von Schlieffen, was
as obsessed by mobilization schedules as his Russian and French counterparts.
But whereas the Franco-Russian military leaders were concerned with defining
the obligation to mobilize, Schlieffen focused on implementing the concept.
Refusing to leave anything to the vagaries of the political environment,
Schlieffen tried to devise a foolproof plan for escaping Germany’s dreaded
encirclement. Just as Bismarck’s successors had abandoned his complex
diplomacy, so Schlieffen jettisoned the strategic concepts of Helmuth von
Moltke, the military architect of Bismarck’s three rapid victories between 1864
and 1870.
Moltke had devised a strategy that left open the option of a political solution
to Bismarck’s nightmare of hostile coalitions. In case of a two-front war, Moltke
planned to split the German army more or less evenly between the East and the
West, and to go on the defensive on both fronts. Since France’s principal
objective was to regain Alsace-Lorraine, it was certain to attack. If Germany
defeated that offensive, France would be obliged to consider a compromise
peace. Moltke specifically warned against extending military operations to Paris,
having learned in the Franco-Prussian War how difficult it was to conclude a
peace while besieging the enemy’s capital.
Moltke proposed the same strategy for the Eastern front—namely, to defeat a
Russian attack and to follow it by pushing the Russian army back to a
strategically significant distance, and then to offer a compromise peace.
Whichever forces first achieved victory would be available to aid the armies on
the other front. In this manner, the scale of the war, the sacrifices, and the
political solution would be kept in some sort of balance.6
But just as Bismarck’s successors had been uncomfortable with the
ambiguities of his overlapping alliances, so Schlieffen rejected Moltke’s plan
because it left the military initiative to Germany’s enemies. Nor did Schlieffen
approve of Moltke’s preference for political compromise over total victory.
Determined to impose terms which were, in effect, unconditional surrender,
Schlieffen elaborated a scheme for a quick and decisive victory on one front and
then throwing all of Germany’s forces against the other adversary, thereby
achieving a clearcut outcome on both fronts. Because a quick, knockout blow in
the East was precluded by the slow pace of Russian mobilization, which was
expected to take six weeks, and by Russia’s vast territory, Schlieffen decided to
destroy the French army first, before the Russian army was fully mobilized. To
circumvent the heavy French fortifications at the German border, Schlieffen
came up with the idea of violating Belgian neutrality by wheeling the German
army through its territory. He would capture Paris and trap the French army from
the rear in its fortresses along the border. In the meantime, Germany would stay
on the defensive in the East.
The plan was as brilliant as it was reckless. A minimum knowledge of history
would have revealed that Great Britain would surely go to war if Belgium was
invaded—a fact which seems to have totally eluded the Kaiser and the German
general staff. For twenty years after the Schlieffen Plan was devised in 1892,
Germany’s leaders had made innumerable proposals to Great Britain to gain its
support—or at least neutrality—in a European war, all of which were rendered
illusory by German military planning. There was no cause for which Great
Britain had fought as consistently or implacably as the independence of the Low
Countries. And Great Britain’s conduct in the wars against Louis XIV and
Napoleon testified to its tenacity. Once engaged, it would fight to the end, even if
France were defeated. Nor did the Schlieffen Plan allow for the possibility of
failure. If Germany did not destroy the French army—which was possible, since
the French had interior lines and railways radiating from Paris whereas the
German army had to march by foot in an arc through a devastated countryside—
Germany would be forced into Moltke’s strategy of defense on both fronts after
it had destroyed the possibility of a political compromise peace by occupying
Belgium. Where the principal goal of Bismarck’s foreign policy had been to
avoid a two-front war and of Moltke’s military strategy to limit it, Schlieffen
insisted on a two-front war conducted in an all-out fashion.
With German deployment focused against France while the most likely origin
of the conflict would be in Eastern Europe, Bismarck’s nightmare question,
“what if there is a two-front war?” was transformed into Schlieffen’s nightmare
question, “what if there is not a two-front war?” If France were to declare
neutrality in a Balkan war, Germany might face the danger of a French
declaration of war after Russian mobilization was complete, as Obruchev had
already explained from the other side of the European dividing line. If, on the
other hand, Germany ignored France’s offer of neutrality, Schlieffen’s plan
would put Germany in the uncomfortable position of attacking nonbelligerent
Belgium in order to get to nonbelligerent France. Schlieffen therefore had to
invent a reason to assault France should France stay on the sidelines. He created
an impossible standard for what Germany would accept as French neutrality.
Germany would regard France as neutral only if it agreed to cede one of its
major fortresses to Germany—in other words, only if France put itself at
Germany’s mercy and abdicated its position as a Great Power.
The unholy mix of general political alliances and hair-trigger military
strategies guaranteed a vast bloodletting. The balance of power had lost any
semblance of the flexibility it had had during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Wherever war erupted (and it would almost certainly be in the
Balkans), the Schlieffen Plan saw to it that the initial battles would be fought in
the West between countries having next to no interest in the immediate crisis.
Foreign policy had abdicated to military strategy, which now consisted of
gambling on a single throw of the dice. A more mindless and technocratic
approach to war would have been difficult to imagine.
Though the military leaders of both sides insisted on the most destructive kind
of war, they were ominously silent about its political consequences in light of the
military technology they were pursuing. What would Europe look like after a
war on the scale they were planning? What changes could justify the carnage
they were preparing? There was not a single specific Russian demand on
Germany or a single German demand on Russia, which merited a local war,
much less a general one.
The diplomats on both sides were silent, too, largely because they did not
understand the political implications of their countries’ time bomb, and because
nationalistic politics in each country made them afraid to challenge their military
establishments. This conspiracy of silence prevented the political leaders of all
the major countries from requesting military plans which established some
correspondence between military and political objectives.
Considering the catastrophe they were brewing, there was something almost
eerie about the lightheartedness of European leaders as they embarked on their
disastrous course. Surprisingly few warnings were ever uttered, an honorable
exception being that of Peter Durnovo, a former Russian Interior Minister who
became a member of the State Council. In February 1914—six months before
the war—he wrote a prophetic memorandum for the Tsar:
The main burden of the war will undoubtedly fall on us, since England is hardly capable of taking a
considerable part in a continental war, while France, poor in manpower, will probably adhere to
strictly defensive tactics, in view of the enormous losses by which war will be attended under present
conditions of military technique. The part of a battering-ram, making a breach in the very thick of the
German defense, will be ours….7
In Durnovo’s judgment, these sacrifices would be wasted because Russia would
not be able to make permanent territorial gains by fighting on the side of Great
Britain, its traditional geopolitical opponent. Though Great Britain would
concede gains to Russia in Central Europe, an additional slice of Poland would
only magnify the already strong centrifugal tendencies within the Russian
Empire. Adding to the Ukrainian population, said Durnovo, would spur demands
for an independent Ukraine. Therefore, victory might have the ironic result of
fostering enough ethnic turmoil to reduce the Tsar’s empire to Little Russia.
Even if Russia realized its century-old goal of conquering the Dardanelles,
Durnovo pointed out that such an achievement would prove strategically empty:
[It] would not give us an outlet to the open sea, however, since on the other side of them there lies a
sea consisting almost wholly of territorial waters, a sea dotted with numerous islands where the
British navy, for instance, would have no trouble whatever in closing to us every inlet and outlet,
irrespective of the Straits.8
Why this simple geopolitical fact should have eluded three generations of
Russians desiring the conquest of Constantinople—and of Englishmen
determined to thwart them—remains a mystery.
Durnovo went on to argue that a war would bring even fewer economic
benefits to Russia. By any calculation, it would cost far more than could possibly
be recouped. A German victory would destroy the Russian economy while a
Russian victory would drain the German economy, leaving nothing for
reparations no matter which side won:
There can be no doubt that the war will necessitate expenditures which are beyond Russia’s limited
financial means. We shall have to obtain credit from allied and neutral countries, but this will not be
granted gratuitously. As to what will happen if the war should end disastrously for us, I do not wish
to discuss now. The financial and economic consequences of defeat can be neither calculated nor
even foreseen, and will undoubtedly spell the total ruin of our entire national economy. But even
victory promises us extremely unfavorable financial prospects; a totally ruined Germany will not be
in a position to compensate us for the cost involved. Dictated in the interest of England, the peace
treaty will not afford Germany opportunity for sufficient economic recuperation to cover our war
expenditures, even at a distant time.9
Yet Durnovo’s strongest reason for opposing the war was his prediction that war
would inevitably lead to social revolution—first in the defeated country and then
spreading from there to the victor:
It is our firm conviction, based upon a long and careful study of all contemporary subversive
tendencies, that there must inevitably break out in the defeated country a social revolution which, by
the very nature of things, will spread to the country of the victor.10
There is no evidence that the Tsar saw the memorandum that might have saved
his dynasty. Nor is there any record of a comparable analysis in other European
capitals. The closest anyone came to Durnovo’s views were a few epigrammatic
comments by Bethmann-Hollweg, the Chancellor who would lead Germany into
the war. In 1913, already much too late, he had expressed, quite accurately, why
German foreign policy proved so unsettling to the rest of Europe:
Challenge everybody, put yourself in everybody’s path and actually weaken no one in this fashion.
Reason: aimlessness, the need for little prestige successes and solicitude for every current of public
opinion.11
That same year, Bethmann-Hollweg laid down another maxim, which might
have saved his country had it been put into practice twenty years earlier:
We must keep France in check through a cautious policy towards Russia and England. Naturally this
does not please our chauvinists and is unpopular. But I see no alternative for Germany in the near
future.12
By the time these lines were written, Europe was already headed into the vortex.
The locale of the crisis that triggered the First World War was irrelevant to the
European balance of power, and the casus belli as accidental as the preceding
diplomacy had been reckless.
On June 28, 1914, Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg throne, paid for
Austria’s rashness in having annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908 with his life.
Not even the manner of his assassination could escape the singular mix of the
tragic and the absurd that marked Austria’s disintegration. The young Serbian
terrorist failed in his first attempt to assassinate Franz Ferdinand, wounding the
driver of the Archduke’s vehicle instead. After arriving at the governor’s
residence and chastising the Austrian administrators for their negligence, Franz
Ferdinand, accompanied by his wife, decided to visit the victim at the hospital.
The royal couple’s new driver took a wrong turn and, in backing out of the
street, came to a stop in front of the astonished would-be assassin, who had been
drowning his frustrations in liquor at a sidewalk cafe. With his victims so
providentially delivered to him by themselves, the assassin did not fail a second
time.
What started out as a near-accident turned into a conflagration with the
inevitability of a Greek tragedy. Because the Archduke’s wife was not of royal
blood, none of the kings of Europe attended the funeral. Had the crowned heads
of state congregated and had an opportunity to exchange views, they might have
proven more reluctant to go to war a few weeks later over what had been, after
all, a terrorist plot.
In all likelihood, not even a royal summit could have prevented Austria from
lighting the fuse which the Kaiser now rashly handed it. Remembering his
promise of the previous year to back Austria in the next crisis, he invited the
Austrian Ambassador to lunch on July 5 and urged speedy action against Serbia.
On July 6, Bethmann-Hollweg confirmed the Kaiser’s pledge: “Austria must
judge what is to be done to clear up her relations with Serbia; but whatever
Austria’s decision, she could count with certainty upon it, that Germany will
stand behind her as an ally.”13
Austria at last had the blank check it had sought for so long, and a real
grievance to which it might be applied. Insensitive as ever to the full
implications of his bravado, William II vanished on a cruise to the Norwegian
fjords (this in the days before radio). Exactly what he had in mind is not clear,
but he obviously did not anticipate a European war. The Kaiser and his
chancellor apparently calculated that Russia was not yet ready for war and would
stand by while Serbia was humiliated, as it had done in 1908. In any event, they
believed they were in a better position for a showdown with Russia than they
would be a few years later.
Maintaining their unbroken record of misjudging the psychology of potential
adversaries, the German leaders were now as convinced of the vastness of their
opportunity as when they had tried to force Great Britain into an alliance by
building a large navy, or to isolate France by threatening war over Morocco.
Operating from the assumption that Austria’s success might break their evertighter encirclement by disillusioning Russia with the Triple Entente, they
ignored France, which they deemed irreconcilable, and evaded mediation by
Great Britain lest it spoil their triumph. They had persuaded themselves that if,
against all expectations, war did break out, Great Britain would either remain
neutral or intervene too late. Yet Serge Sazonov, Russia’s Foreign Minister at the
outbreak of the war, described why Russia would not back off this time:
Ever since the Crimean War, we could entertain no illusions on the subject of Austria’s feelings
toward us. On the day she initiated her predatory policy in the Balkans, hoping thereby to prop up the
tottering structure of her dominion, her relations with us became more and more unfriendly. We were
able, however, to reconcile ourselves to this inconvenience, until it became clear that her Balkan
policy had the sympathy of Germany, and received encouragement from Berlin.14
Russia felt it had to resist what it interpreted as a German maneuver to destroy
its position among the Slavs by humiliating Serbia, its most reliable ally in the
area. “It was clear,” wrote Sazonov, “that we had to do not with the rash decision
of a shortsighted Minister, undertaken at his own risk and on his own
responsibility, but with a carefully prepared plan, elaborated with the aid of the
German Government, without whose consent and promise of support AustriaHungary would never have ventured upon its execution.”15
Another Russian diplomat later wrote nostalgically of the difference between
the Germany of Bismarck and the Germany of the Kaiser:
The Great War was the -inevitable consequence of the encouragement given by Germany to AustriaHungary in her policy of penetration into the Balkans, which was combined with the grandiose PanGerman idea of a Germanized “Middle-Europe.” In Bismarck’s day this never would have happened.
What did happen was the result of Germany’s novel ambition to grapple with a task more stupendous
than that of Bismarck—without a Bismarck.16 I
The Russian diplomats were paying the Germans too great an honor, for the
Kaiser and his advisers had no more of a long-range plan in 1914 than they had
had during any previous crisis. The crisis over the Archduke’s assassination ran
out of control because no leader was prepared to back down and every country
was concerned above all with living up to formal treaty obligations rather than to
an overall concept of long-range common interest. What Europe lacked was
some all-encompassing value system to bind the powers together, such as had
existed in the Metternich system or the coldblooded diplomatic flexibility of
Bismarck’s Realpolitik. World War I started not because countries broke their
treaties, but because they fulfilled them to the letter.
Of the many curious aspects of the prelude to the First World War, one of the
strangest was that nothing happened at first. Austria, true to its operating style,
procrastinated, in part because Vienna needed time to overcome the reluctance of
Hungarian Prime Minister Stephen Tisza to risk the Empire. When he finally
yielded, Vienna issued a forty-eight-hour ultimatum to Serbia on July 23,
deliberately putting forward such onerous conditions that they were sure to be
rejected. Yet the delay had cost Austria the benefits of the widespread initial
feelings of indignation in Europe over the Archduke’s assassination.
In Metternich’s Europe, with its shared commitment to legitimacy, there can
be little doubt that Russia would have sanctioned Austrian retribution against
Serbia for the assassination of a prince in direct line of succession to the
Austrian throne. But by 1914, legitimacy was no longer a common bond.
Russia’s sympathy for its ally, Serbia, outweighed its outrage at the assassination
of Franz Ferdinand.
For the entire month following the assassination, Austrian diplomacy had
been dilatory. Then came the mad rush to cataclysm in the space of less than a
week. The Austrian ultimatum drove events out of the control of the political
leaders. For once the ultimatum had been issued, any major country was in a
position to trigger the irreversible race to mobilization. Ironically, the
mobilization juggernaut was set off by the one country for which mobilization
schedules were essentially irrelevant. For, alone among all the major powers,
Austria’s military plans were still old-fashioned in that they did not depend on
speed. It mattered little to Austrian war plans which week the war started, as
long as its armies were able to fight Serbia sooner or later. Austria had delivered
its ultimatum to Serbia in order to forestall mediation, not to speed military
operations. Nor did Austrian mobilization threaten any other major power, since
it would take a month to be completed.
Thus, the mobilization schedules which made war inevitable were set in
motion by the country whose army did not actually start fighting until after the
major battles in the West were already over. On the other hand and whatever the
state of Austria’s readiness, if Russia wanted to threaten Austria, it would have
to mobilize some troops, an act which would trigger the irreversible in Germany
(though none of the political leaders seemed to have grasped this danger). The
paradox of July 1914 was that the countries which had political reasons to go to
war were not tied to rigid mobilization schedules while nations with rigid
schedules, such as Germany and Russia, had no political reason to go to war.
Great Britain, the country in the best position to arrest this chain of events,
hesitated. It had next to no interest in the Balkan crisis, though it did have a
major interest in preserving the Triple Entente. Dreading war, it feared a German
triumph even more. Had Great Britain declared unambiguously its intentions and
made Germany understand that it would enter a general war, the Kaiser might
well have turned away from confrontation. That is how Sazonov saw it later:
I cannot refrain from expressing the opinion that if in 1914 Sir Edward Grey had, as I insistently
requested him, made a timely and equally unambiguous announcement of the solidarity of Great
Britain with France and Russia, he might have saved humanity from that terrible cataclysm, the
consequences of which endangered the very existence of European civilization.17
The British leaders were reluctant to risk the Triple Entente by indicating any
hesitation to support their allies and, somewhat contradictorily, did not want to
threaten Germany so as to keep open the option of mediating at the right
moment. As a result, Great Britain fell between two stools. It had no legal
obligation to go to war on the side of France and Russia, as Grey assured the
House of Commons on June 11, 1914, a little more than two weeks before the
Archduke’s assassination:
…if war arose between European Powers, there were no unpublished agreements which would
restrict or hamper the freedom of the Government or Parliament to decide whether or not Great
Britain should participate in a war….18
Legally, this was certainly true. But there was an intangible moral dimension
involved as well. The French navy was in the Mediterranean because of France’s
naval agreement with Great Britain; as a result, the coast of northern France
would be wide open to the German navy if Great Britain stayed out of the war.
As the crisis developed, Bethmann-Hollweg pledged not to employ the German
navy against France if Great Britain promised to remain neutral. But Grey
refused this bargain, for the same reason that he had rejected the German offer in
1909 to slow down its naval buildup in return for British neutrality in a European
war—he suspected that after France was defeated, Great Britain would be at
Germany’s mercy.
You must inform the German Chancellor that his proposal that we should bind ourselves to neutrality
on such terms cannot for a moment be entertained.
…For us to make this bargain with Germany at the expense of France would be a disgrace from
which the good name of this country would never recover.
The Chancellor also in effect asks us to bargain away whatever obligation or interest we have as
regards the neutrality of Belgium. We could not entertain that bargain either.19
Grey’s dilemma was that his country had become snared between the pressures
of public opinion and the traditions of its foreign policy. On the one hand, the
lack of public support for going to war over a Balkan issue would have
suggested mediation. On the other hand, if France were defeated or lost
confidence in the British alliance, Germany would be in the dominant position
the British had always resisted. Therefore, it is highly probable that, in the end,
Great Britain would have gone to war to prevent a French military collapse even
if Germany had not invaded Belgium, although it could have taken some time
for the British people’s support for the war to crystallize. During that period,
Great Britain might have tried to mediate. However, Germany’s decision to
challenge one of the most established principles of English foreign policy—that
the Low Countries must not fall into the hands of a major power—served to
resolve British doubts and guaranteed that the war would not end with a
compromise.
Grey reasoned that, by not taking sides in the early stages of the crisis, Great
Britain would retain its claim to the impartiality which might permit it to broker
a solution. And past experience supported this strategy. The outcome of
heightened international tensions for twenty years had invariably been a
conference. However, in no previous crisis had there been any mobilization. As
all the Great Powers were getting ready to mobilize, the margin of time available
for traditional diplomatic methods vanished. Thus, in the crucial ninety-six hours
during which mobilization schedules destroyed the opportunity for political
maneuvering, the British Cabinet in effect assumed the role of bystander.
Austria’s ultimatum backed Russia against the wall at a moment when it
already believed it had been sorely misused. Bulgaria, whose liberation from
Turkish rule had been brought about by Russia through several wars, was
leaning toward Germany. Austria, having annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina, seemed
to be seeking to turn Serbia, Russia’s last significant Balkan ally, into a
protectorate. Finally, with Germany establishing itself in Constantinople, Russia
could only wonder whether the age of Pan-Slavism might not end in the Teutonic
domination of everything it had coveted for a century.
Even so, Tsar Nicholas II was not eager for a showdown with Germany. At a
ministerial meeting on July 24, he reviewed Russia’s options. The Finance
Minister, Peter Bark, reported the Tsar as saying: “War would be disastrous for
the world, and once it had broken out it would be difficult to stop.” In addition,
Bark noted, “The German Emperor had frequently assured him of his sincere
desire to safeguard the peace of Europe.” And he reminded the ministers of “the
German Emperor’s loyal attitude during the Russo-Japanese War and during the
internal troubles that Russia had experienced afterwards.”20
The rebuttal came from Aleksandr Krivoshein, the powerful Minister of
Agriculture. Demonstrating Russia’s endemic refusal to forget a slight, he argued
that, despite the Kaiser’s kind letters to his cousin, Tsar Nicholas, the German
had bullied Russia during the Bosnian crisis of 1908. Therefore, “public and
parliamentary opinion would fail to understand why, at the critical moment
involving Russia’s vital interest, the Imperial Government was reluctant to act
boldly…. Our exaggeratedly prudent attitudes had unfortunately not succeeded
in placating the Central European Powers.”21
Krivoshein’s argument was supported by a dispatch from the Russian
Ambassador in Sofia to the effect that, if Russia backed down, “our prestige in
the Slav world and in the Balkans would perish never to return.”22 Heads of
government are notoriously vulnerable to arguments that question their courage.
In the end, the Tsar suppressed his premonitions of disaster and opted for
backing Serbia even at the risk of war, though he stopped short of ordering
mobilization.
When Serbia responded to Austria’s ultimatum on July 25 in an unexpectedly
conciliatory fashion—accepting all Austrian demands except one—the Kaiser,
just back from his cruise, thought that the crisis was over. But he did not count
on Austria’s determination to exploit the backing he had proffered so
incautiously. Above all, he had forgotten—if indeed he had ever known it—that,
with the Great Powers so close to the brink of war, mobilization schedules were
likely to outrun diplomacy.
On July 28, Austria declared war against Serbia, even though it would not be
ready for military action until August 12. On the same day, the Tsar ordered
partial mobilization against Austria and discovered to his surprise that the only
plan the general staff had readied was for general mobilization against both
Germany and Austria, despite the fact that for the past fifty years Austria had
stood in the way of Russia’s Balkan ambitions, and that a localized AustroRussian war had been a staple of military-staff schools during that entire period.
Russia’s Foreign Minister, unaware that he was living in a fool’s paradise, sought
to reassure Berlin on July 28: “The military measures taken by us in
consequence of the Austria declaration of war… not a single one of them was
directed against Germany.”23
The Russian military leaders, without exception disciples of Obruchev’s
theories, were appalled by the Tsar’s restraint. They wanted general mobilization
and thus war with Germany, which had taken no military steps so far. One of the
leading generals told Sazonov that “war had become inevitable and that we were
in danger of losing it before we had time to unsheath our sword.”24
If the Tsar had been too hesitant for his generals, he was far too decisive for
Germany. All German war plans were based on knocking France out of a war
within six weeks, and then turning against a presumably still not fully mobilized
Russia. Any Russian mobilization—even a partial one—would cut into this
timetable and lower the odds of Germany’s already risky gamble. Accordingly,
on July 29, Germany demanded that Russia stop its mobilization or Germany
would follow suit. And everyone knew that German mobilization was
tantamount to war.
The Tsar was too weak to yield. Stopping partial mobilization would have
unraveled the entire Russian military planning, and the resistance of his generals
convinced him that the die was cast. On July 30, Nicholas ordered full
mobilization. On July 31, Germany once more demanded an end to Russian
mobilization. When that request was ignored, Germany declared war on Russia.
This occurred without a single serious political exchange between St. Petersburg
and Berlin about the substance of the crisis, and in the absence of any tangible
dispute between Germany and Russia.
Germany now faced the problem that its war plans required an immediate
attack on France, which had been quiescent throughout the crisis except to
encourage Russia not to compromise by pledging France’s unconditional
support. Understanding at last where twenty years of histrionics had landed him,
the Kaiser tried to divert Germany’s mobilization away from France and toward
Russia. His attempt to rein in the military was as much in vain as the Tsar’s
previous, similar effort to limit the scope of Russian mobilization. The German
general staff was no more willing than its Russian counterpart to scrap twenty
years of planning; indeed, no more than the Russian staff did it have an alternate
plan. Though both the Tsar and the Emperor had wanted to pull back from the
brink, neither knew how to do it—the Tsar because he was prevented from
carrying out partial mobilization, the Kaiser because he was kept from
mobilizing only against Russia. Both were thwarted by the military machinery
which they had helped to construct and which, once set in motion, proved
irreversible.
On August 1, Germany inquired of France whether it intended to remain
neutral. Had France replied in the affirmative, Germany would have demanded
the fortresses of Verdun and Toul as tokens of good faith. Instead, France replied
rather enigmatically that it would act in accordance with its national interest.
Germany, of course, had no specific issue with which to justify war with France,
which had been a bystander in the Balkan crisis. Again, the mobilization
schedules were the driving force. Thus, Germany trumped up some French
border violations and, on August 3, declared war. The same day, German troops,
carrying out the Schlieffen Plan, invaded Belgium. On the next day, August 4, to
the surprise of no one except the German leaders, Great Britain declared war on
Germany.
The Great Powers had succeeded in turning a secondary Balkan crisis into a
world war. A dispute over Bosnia and Serbia had led to the invasion of Belgium,
at the other end of Europe, which had in turn made Great Britain’s entry into the
war inevitable. Ironically, by the time the decisive battles were being fought on
the Western front, Austrian troops had still not taken the offensive against
Serbia.
Germany learned too late that there can be no certainty in war and that its
obsessive quest for a quick and decisive victory had landed it in a draining war
of attrition. In implementing the Schlieffen Plan, Germany dashed all its hopes
for British neutrality without succeeding in destroying the French army, which
had been the purpose of taking the risks in the first place. Ironically, Germany
lost the offensive battle in the West and won the defensive battle in the East,
much as the elder Moltke had foreseen. In the end, Germany was obliged to
adopt Moltke’s defensive strategy in the West as well after having committed
itself to a policy which excluded the compromise political peace on which
Moltke’s strategy had been based.
The Concert of Europe failed miserably because the political leadership had
abdicated. As a result, the sort of European Congress which throughout most of
the nineteenth century had provided a cooling-off period or led to an actual
solution, was not even attempted. European leaders had provided for every
contingency except the time needed for diplomatic conciliation. And they had
forgotten Bismarck’s dictum: “Woe to the leader whose arguments at the end of
a war are not as plausible as they were at the beginning.”
By the time events had run their course, 20 million lay dead; the AustroHungarian Empire had disappeared; three of the four dynasties which entered the
war—the German, the Austrian, and the Russian—were overthrown. Only the
British royal house remained standing. Afterward, it was hard to recall exactly
what had triggered the conflagration. All that anyone knew was that, from the
ashes produced by monumental folly, a new European system had to be
constructed, though its nature was difficult to discern amidst the passion and the
exhaustion deposited by the carnage.
I. The Russian memoirs must be taken with a grain of salt because they were trying to shift the total
responsibility for the war onto Germany’s shoulders. Sazonov in particular must bear part of the blame
because he clearly belonged to the war party pushing for full mobilization—even though his overall
analysis has much merit.
CHAPTER NINE
The New Face of Diplomacy: Wilson and the
Treaty of Versailles
On November 11, 1918, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George
announced that an armistice between Germany and the Allied Powers had been
signed with these words: “I hope that we may say that thus, this fateful morning,
come to an end all wars.”1 In reality, Europe was a mere two decades away from
an even more cataclysmic war.
Since nothing about the First World War had gone as planned, it was
inevitable that the quest for peace would prove as futile as the expectations with
which nations had launched themselves into the catastrophe. Every participant
had anticipated a brief war and had left the determination of its peace terms to
the sort of diplomatic congress which had ended European conflicts for the past
century. But as the casualties mounted to horrendous proportions, they
obliterated the political disputes of the prelude to the conflict—the competition
for influence in the Balkans, the possession of Alsace-Lorraine, and the naval
race. The nations of Europe came to blame their suffering on the inherent evil of
their adversaries, and convinced themselves that compromise could bring no real
peace; the enemy had to be totally defeated or the war fought to utter exhaustion.
Had European leaders continued the practices of the prewar international
order, a compromise peace would have been made in the spring of 1915.
Offensives by each side had run their bloody course, and stalemate prevailed on
all fronts. But just as mobilization schedules had run away with diplomacy in the
week prior to the outbreak of the war, so now the scale of the sacrifices stood in
the way of a sensible compromise. Instead, the leaders of Europe kept raising
their terms, thereby not only compounding the incompetence and the
irresponsibility with which they had slid into war, but destroying the world order
in which their nations had coexisted for nearly a century.
By the winter of 1914–15, military strategy and foreign policy had lost touch
with each other. None of the belligerents dared to explore a compromise peace.
France would not settle without regaining Alsace-Lorraine; Germany would not
consider a peace in which it would be asked to give up the territory it had
conquered. Once plunged into war, the leaders of Europe became so obsessed
with fratricide, so maddened by the progressive destruction of an entire
generation of their young men, that victory turned into its own reward,
regardless of the ruins on which that triumph would have to be erected.
Murderous offensives confirmed the military stalemate and produced casualties
unimaginable before the advent of modern technology. Efforts to enlist new
allies deepened the political deadlock. For each new ally—Italy and Romania on
the Allied side, Bulgaria on the side of the Central Powers—demanded its share
of the anticipated booty, thereby destroying whatever flexibility might have
remained to diplomacy.
Peace terms gradually took on a nihilistic character. The aristocratic,
somewhat conspiratorial style of nineteenth-century diplomacy proved irrelevant
in the age of mass mobilization. The Allied side specialized in couching the war
in moral slogans such as “the war to end all wars” or “making the world safe for
Democracy”—especially after America entered the war. The first of these goals
was understandable, if not highly promising, for nations that had been fighting
each other in various combinations for a thousand years. Its practical
interpretation was the complete disarmament of Germany. The second
proposition—spreading democracy—required the overthrow of German and
Austrian domestic institutions. Both Allied slogans therefore implied a fight to
the finish.
Great Britain, which in the Napoleonic Wars had produced a blueprint for
European equilibrium via the Pitt Plan, supported the pressures for an all-out
victory. In December 1914, a German feeler offering to withdraw from Belgium
in exchange for the Belgian Congo was rejected by British Foreign Secretary
Grey with the argument that the Allies must be given “security against any future
attack from Germany.”2
Grey’s comment marked a transformation in the British attitude. Until shortly
before the outbreak of the war, Great Britain had identified its security with the
balance of power, which it protected by supporting the weaker side against the
stronger. By 1914, Great Britain felt less and less comfortable in this role.
Sensing that Germany had become stronger than all the rest of the Continent
combined, Great Britain felt it could no longer play its traditional role of trying
to remain above the fray in Europe. Because it perceived Germany as a
hegemonic threat in Europe, a return to the status quo ante would do nothing to
alleviate the fundamental problem. Thus, Great Britain, too, would no longer
accept compromise and insisted on its own “guarantees,” which amounted to the
permanent weakening of Germany, especially a sharp reduction of the German
High Sea Fleet—something Germany would never accept unless it were totally
defeated.
The German terms were both more precise and more geopolitical. Yet with
their characteristic lack of a sense of proportion, the German leaders, too, asked
for what amounted to unconditional surrender. In the West, they demanded the
annexation of the coal fields of northern France and military control over
Belgium, including the port of Antwerp, which guaranteed Great Britain’s
implacable hostility. In the East, Germany only stated formal terms with respect
to Poland, where, on November 5, 1916, it promised to create “an independent
State with a hereditary and constitutional monarchy”3—dashing any prospect for
a compromise peace with Russia. (Germany’s hope had been that the promise of
Polish independence would produce enough Polish volunteers for five divisions;
as it turned out, only 3,000 recruits showed up.)4 After defeating Russia,
Germany imposed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on March 3, 1918, by which it
annexed a third of European Russia and established a protectorate over the
Ukraine. In finally defining what it meant by Weltpolitik, Germany was opting
for the domination of Europe at the very least.
The First World War began as a typical cabinet war, with notes being passed
from embassy to embassy, and telegrams being distributed among sovereign
monarchs at all the decisive steps on the road to actual combat. But once war had
been declared, and as the streets of European capitals filled with cheering
throngs, the conflict ceased being a conflict of chancelleries and turned into a
struggle of the masses. After the first two years of the war, each side was stating
terms incompatible with any notion of equilibrium.
What proved beyond everyone’s imagination was that both sides would win
and lose at the same time: that Germany would defeat Russia and seriously
weaken both France and England; but that, in the end, the Western Allies, with
America’s indispensable assistance, would emerge as the victors. The aftermath
of the Napoleonic Wars had been a century of peace based on equilibrium and
sustained by common values. The aftermath of World War I was social upheaval,
ideological conflict, and another world war.
The enthusiasm that marked the beginning of the war evaporated once the
peoples of Europe came to understand that their governments’ ability to produce
the carnage was not matched by a commensurate ability to achieve either victory
or peace. In the resulting maelstrom, the Eastern Courts, whose unity had
sustained the peace of Europe in the days of the Holy Alliance, were
overthrown. The Austro-Hungarian Empire disappeared altogether. The Russian
Empire was taken over by the Bolsheviks and for two decades receded into the
periphery of Europe. Germany was successively racked by defeat, revolution,
inflation, economic depression, and dictatorship. France and Great Britain did
not benefit from the weakened state of their adversaries. They had sacrificed the
best of their young men for a peace which left the enemy geopolitically stronger
than it had been before the war.
Before the full dimension of this largely self-inflicted debacle could become
evident, a new player appeared on the scene to end once and for all what had up
to this time been called the Concert of Europe. Amidst the rubble and the
disillusionment of three years of carnage, America stepped into the international
arena with a confidence, a power, and an idealism that were unimaginable to its
more jaded European allies.
America’s entry into the war made total victory technically possible, but it
was for goals which bore little relation to the world order Europe had known for
some three centuries and for which it had presumably entered the war. America
disdained the concept of the balance of power and considered the practice of
Realpolitik immoral. America’s criteria for international order were democracy,
collective security, and self-determination—none of which had undergirded any
previous European settlement.
To Americans, the dissonance between their philosophy and European thought
underlined the merit of their beliefs. Proclaiming a radical departure from the
precepts and experiences of the Old World, Wilson’s idea of world order derived
from Americans’ faith in the essentially peaceful nature of man and an
underlying harmony of the world. It followed that democratic nations were, by
definition, peaceful; people granted self-determination would no longer have
reason to go to war or to oppress others. Once all the peoples of the world had
tasted of the blessings of peace and democracy, they would surely rise as one to
defend their gains.
European leaders had no categories of thought to encompass such views.
Neither their domestic institutions nor their international order had been based
on political theories postulating man’s essential goodness. Rather, they had been
designed to place man’s demonstrated selfishness in the service of a higher good.
European diplomacy was predicated not on the peace-loving nature of states but
on their propensity for war, which needed to be either discouraged or balanced.
Alliances were formed in the pursuit of specific, definable objectives, not in the
defense of peace in the abstract.
Wilson’s doctrines of self-determination and collective security put European
diplomats on thoroughly unfamiliar terrain. The assumption behind all European
settlements had been that borders could be adjusted to promote the balance of
power, the requirements of which took precedence over the preferences of the
affected populations. This was how Pitt had envisaged the “great masses” to
contain France at the end of the Napoleonic Wars.
Throughout the nineteenth century, for example, Great Britain and Austria
resisted the breakup of the Ottoman Empire because they were convinced that
the smaller nations emerging from it would undermine international order. To
their way of thinking, the smaller nations’ inexperience would magnify endemic
ethnic rivalries, while their relative weakness would tempt Great Power
encroachment. In the British and Austrian view, the smaller states had to
subordinate their national ambitions to the broader interests of peace. In the
name of equilibrium, France had been prevented from annexing the Frenchspeaking Walloon part of Belgium, and Germany was discouraged from uniting
with Austria (though Bismarck had his own reasons for not seeking a union with
Austria).
Wilson entirely rejected this approach, as the United States has done ever
since. In America’s view, it was not self-determination which caused wars but
the lack of it; not the absence of a balance of power that produced instability but
the pursuit of it. Wilson proposed to found peace on the principle of collective
security. In his view and that of all his disciples, the security of the world called
for, not the defense of the national interest, but of peace as a legal concept. The
determination of whether a breach of peace had indeed been committed required
an international institution, which Wilson defined as the League of Nations.
Oddly enough, the idea for such an organization first surfaced in London,
heretofore the bastion of balance-of-power diplomacy. And the motive for it was
not an attempt to invent a new world order but England’s search for a good
reason why America should enter a war of the old order. In September 1915, in a
revolutionary departure from British practice, Foreign Secretary Grey wrote to
Wilson’s confidant, Colonel House, with a proposal which he believed the
idealistic American President would not be able to refuse.
To what extent, asked Grey, might the President be interested in a League of
Nations committed to enforcing disarmament and to the pacific settlement of
disputes?
Would the President propose that there should be a League of Nations binding themselves to side
against any Power which broke a treaty… or which refused, in case of dispute, to adopt some other
method of settlement than that of war?5
It was unlikely that Great Britain, which for 200 years had steered clear of openended alliances, had suddenly developed a taste for open-ended commitments on
a global scale. Yet Great Britain’s determination to prevail against the immediate
threat of Germany was so great that its Foreign Secretary could bring himself to
put forward a doctrine of collective security, the most open-ended commitment
imaginable. Every member of his proposed world organization would have an
obligation to resist aggression anywhere and from whatever quarter, and to
penalize nations which rejected the pacific settlement of disputes.
Grey knew his man. From the days of his youth, Wilson had believed that
American federal institutions should serve as a model for an eventual
“parliament of man”; early in his presidency, he was already exploring a PanAmerican pact for the Western Hemisphere. Grey could not have been surprised
—though surely he was gratified—to receive a prompt reply falling in with what
was, in retrospect, his rather transparent hint.
The exchange was perhaps the earliest demonstration of the “special
relationship” between America and Great Britain that would enable Great Britain
to maintain a unique influence in Washington long after the decline of its power
in the wake of the Second World War. A common language and cultural heritage
combined with great tactfulness to enable British leaders to inject their ideas into
the American decision-making process in such a manner that they imperceptibly
seemed to be a part of Washington’s own. Thus, when, in May 1916, Wilson
advanced for the first time his scheme for a world organization, he was no doubt
convinced that it had been his own idea. And in a way it had been, since Grey
had proposed it in full awareness of Wilson’s likely convictions.
Regardless of its immediate parentage, the League of Nations was a
quintessentially American concept. What Wilson envisaged was a “universal
association of the nations to maintain the inviolate security of the highway of the
seas for the common and unhindered use of all the nations of the world, and to
prevent any war begun either contrary to treaty covenants or without warning
and full submission of the causes to the opinion of the world—a virtual
guarantee of territorial integrity and political independence.”6
Initially, however, Wilson refrained from offering American participation in
this “universal association.” Finally in January 1917, he took the leap and
advocated American membership, using, amazingly enough, the Monroe
Doctrine as a model:
I am proposing, as it were, that the nations should with one accord adopt the doctrine of President
Monroe as the doctrine of the world: that no nation should seek to extend its polity over any other
nation or people,… that all nations henceforth avoid entangling alliances which would draw them
into competitions of power….7
Mexico was probably astonished to learn that the president of the country which
had seized a third of its territory in the nineteenth century and had sent its troops
into Mexico the preceding year was now presenting the Monroe Doctrine as a
guarantee for the territorial integrity of sister nations and as a classic example of
international cooperation.
Wilson’s idealism stopped short of the belief that his views would prevail in
Europe on their inherent merits. He showed himself quite prepared to
supplement argument with pressure. Shortly after America entered the war in
April 1917, he wrote to Colonel House: “When the war is over we can force
them to our way of thinking, because by that time they will, among other things,
be financially in our hands.”8 For the time being, several of the Allies lingered
over their responses to Wilson’s idea. Though they could not quite bring
themselves to approve views so contrary to their traditions, they also needed
America far too much to voice their reservations.
In late October 1917, Wilson dispatched House to ask the Europeans to
formulate war aims which would reflect his proclaimed aim for a peace without
annexations or indemnities safeguarded by a world authority. For several
months, Wilson refrained from putting forward his own views because, as he
explained to House, France and Italy might object if America expressed doubts
about the justice of their territorial aspirations.9
Finally, on January 8, 1918, Wilson proceeded on his own. With extraordinary
eloquence and elevation, he put forward America’s war aims before a joint
session of Congress, presenting them in the form of Fourteen Points which were
divided into two parts. He described eight points as being obligatory in the sense
that they “must” be fulfilled. These included open diplomacy, freedom of the
seas, general disarmament, the removal of trade barriers, impartial settlement of
colonial claims, the restoration of Belgium, the evacuation of Russian territory,
and, as the crown jewel, the establishment of a League of Nations.
Wilson introduced the remaining six points, which were more specific, with
the statement that they “should” rather than “must” be achieved, presumably
because, in his view, they were not absolutely indispensable. Surprisingly, the
restoration of Alsace-Lorraine to France was included in the non-obligatory
category, even though a determination to regain that region had sustained French
policy for half a century and through unprecedented sacrifices in the war. Other
“desirable” goals were described as autonomy for the minorities of the AustroHungarian and Ottoman Empires, readjustment of Italy’s frontiers, evacuation of
the Balkans, internationalization of the Dardanelles, and the creation of an
independent Poland with access to the sea. Did Wilson mean to imply that these
six conditions were subject to compromise? Poland’s access to the sea and the
modification of Italy’s frontiers would surely be difficult to reconcile with the
principle of self-determination and were, for this reason, the first flaws in the
moral symmetry of Wilson’s design.
Wilson concluded his presentation with an appeal to Germany in the name of
the spirit of conciliation with which America would approach the building of a
new international order—an attitude precluding historical war aims:
We grudge her no achievement or distinction of learning or of pacific enterprise such as have made
her record very bright and very enviable. We do not wish to injure her or to block in any way her
legitimate influence or power. We do not wish to fight her either with arms or with hostile
arrangements of trade if she is willing to associate herself with us and the other peace-loving nations
of the world in covenants of justice and law and fair dealing. We wish her only to accept a place of
equality among the peoples of the world….10
Never before had such revolutionary goals been put forward with so few
guidelines as to how to implement them. The world Wilson envisaged would be
based on principle, not power; on law, not interest—for both victor and
vanquished; in other words, a complete reversal of the historical experience and
method of operation of the Great Powers. Symbolic of this was the way Wilson
described his and America’s role in the war. America had joined what, due to
Wilson’s aversion to the word “ally,” he preferred to call “one side” of one of the
most ferocious wars in history, and Wilson was acting as if he were the principal
mediator. For what Wilson seemed to be saying was that the war had been fought
not to achieve certain specific conditions but to engender a particular attitude on
the part of Germany. Hence the war had been about conversion, not geopolitics.
In an address at London’s Guildhall on December 28, 1918, after the
Armistice, Wilson explicitly condemned the balance of power as unstable and
based on “jealous watchfulness and an antagonism of interests”:
They [the Allied soldiers] fought to do away with an old order and to establish a new one, and the
center and characteristic of the old order was that unstable thing which we used to call the “balance
of power”—a thing in which the balance was determined by the sword which was thrown in the one
side or the other; a balance which was determined by the unstable equilibrium of the competitive
interests…. The men who have fought in this war have been the men from free nations who were
determined that that sort of thing should end now and forever.11
Wilson was surely right about the European nations’ having made a mess of
things. However, it was not so much the balance of power as Europe’s abdication
of it that had caused the debacle of World War I. The leaders of pre-World War I
Europe had neglected the historic balance of power and abandoned the periodic
adjustments which had avoided final showdowns. They had substituted a bipolar
world much less flexible than even the Cold War world of the future, in that it
lacked the cataclysmic inhibitions of the Nuclear Age. While paying lip service
to equilibrium, the leaders of Europe had catered to the most nationalistic
elements of their public opinion. Neither their political nor their military
arrangements allowed for any flexibility; there was no safety valve between the
status quo and conflagration. This had led to crises that could not be settled and
to endless public posturing that, in the end, permitted no retreat.
Wilson accurately identified some of the principal challenges of the twentieth
century—most especially how to put power into the service of peace. But his
solutions too often compounded the problems he identified. For he ascribed
competition among states primarily to the absence of self-determination and to
economic motives. Yet history shows many other, more frequent, causes of
competition, prominent among which are national aggrandizement and the
exaltation of the ruler or the ruling group. Disdainful of such impulses, Wilson
was convinced that the spread of democracy would arrest them and selfdetermination would deprive them of their focal points.
Wilson’s remedy of collective security presupposed that the nations of the
world would unite against aggression, injustice, and, presumably, excessive
selfishness. In an appearance before the Senate early in 1917, Wilson asserted
that the establishment of equal rights among states would provide the
precondition for maintaining peace through collective security regardless of the
power each nation represented.
Right must be based upon the common strength, not upon the individual strength, of the nations upon
whose concert peace will depend. Equality of territory or of resources there of course cannot be; nor
any other sort of equality not gained in the ordinary peaceful and legitimate development of the
peoples themselves. But no one asks or expects anything more than an equality of rights. Mankind is
looking now for freedom of life, not for equipoises of power.12
Wilson was proposing a world order in which resistance to aggression would be
based on moral rather than geopolitical judgments. Nations would ask
themselves whether an act was unjust rather than whether it was threatening.
Though America’s allies had little faith in this new dispensation, they felt too
weak to challenge it. America’s allies knew or thought they knew how to
calculate equilibrium based on power; they had no confidence that they, or
anyone else, knew how to assess equilibrium on the basis of moral precepts.
Before America’s entry into the war, the European democracies never dared to
express openly their doubts about Wilson’s ideas and indeed made every attempt
to enlist Wilson by humoring him. By the time America did join the Allies, they
were desperate. The combined forces of Great Britain, France, and Russia had
not been sufficient to overcome Germany and, in the aftermath of the Russian
Revolution, they feared that America’s entry into the war might do no more than
offset Russia’s collapse. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Russia showed what
fate Germany had in mind for the losers. Fear of German victory kept Great
Britain and France from debating war aims with their idealistic American
partner.
After the Armistice, the Allies found themselves in a better position to express
their reservations. Nor would it have been the first time that a European alliance
was strained or broken in the aftermath of victory (for example, the Congress of
Vienna went through a phase in which the victors threatened each other with
war). Yet the victors of the First World War were too drained by their sacrifices
and still too dependent on the American giant to risk a testy dialogue with it, or
its withdrawal from the peace settlement.
This was especially true of France, which now found itself in a truly tragic
position. For two centuries it had struggled to achieve the mastery of Europe,
but, in the war’s aftermath, it no longer had confidence in its ability to protect
even its own frontiers against a defeated enemy. French leaders felt instinctively
that containing Germany was beyond the capacity of their ravaged society. War
had exhausted France and the peace seemed to induce premonitions of further
catastrophe. France, which had fought for its existence, now struggled for its
identity. France dared not stand alone, yet its most powerful ally was proposing
to found the peace on principles that turned security into a judicial process.
Victory brought home to France the stark realization that revanche had cost it
too dearly, and that it had been living off capital for nearly a century. France
alone knew just how weak it had become in comparison with Germany, though
nobody else, especially not America, was prepared to believe it. Thus, on the eve
of victory began a Franco-American dialogue which accelerated the process of
French demoralization. Like Israel in the modern period, France masked its
vulnerability with prickliness, and incipient panic with intransigence. And, like
Israel in the modern period, it stood in constant danger of isolation.
Though France’s allies insisted that its fears were exaggerated, French leaders
knew better. In 1880, the French had represented 15.7 percent of Europe’s
population. By 1900, that figure had declined to 9.7 percent. In 1920, France had
a population of 41 million and Germany a population of 65 million, causing the
French statesman Briand to answer critics of his conciliatory policy toward
Germany with the argument that he was conducting the foreign policy of
France’s birthrate.
France’s relative economic decline was even more dramatic. In 1850, France
had been the largest industrial nation on the Continent. By 1880, German
production of steel, coal, and iron exceeded that of France. In 1913, France
produced 41 million tons of coal compared with Germany’s 279 million tons; by
the late 1930s, the disparity was to widen to 47 million tons produced by France
against Germany’s total of 351 million tons.13
The residual strength of the defeated enemy marked the essential difference
between the post-Vienna and post-Versailles international orders, and the reason
for it was the disunity of the victors after Versailles. A coalition of powers
defeated Napoleon and a coalition of powers was needed to surmount imperial
Germany. Even after losing, both of the vanquished—France in 1815 and
Germany in 1918—remained strong enough to overcome any one of the
coalition members singly and perhaps even a combination of two of them. The
difference was that, in 1815, the peacemakers at the Congress of Vienna stayed
united and formed the Quadruple Alliance—an overwhelming coalition of four
powers that would crush any revisionist dreams. In the post-Versailles period,
the victors did not remain allied, America and the Soviet Union withdrew
altogether, and Great Britain was highly ambivalent as far as France was
concerned.
It was not until the post-Versailles period that France came to the searing
realization that its defeat by Germany in 1871 had not been an aberration. The
only way France could have maintained equilibrium with Germany by itself
would have been to break Germany up into its component states, perhaps by
reestablishing the German Confederation of the nineteenth century. Indeed,
France fitfully pursued this objective by encouraging separatism in the
Rhineland and by occupying the Saar coal mines.
Two obstacles, however, stood in the way of the partitioning of Germany. For
one, Bismarck had built too well. The Germany he created retained its sense of
unity through defeats in two world wars, through the French occupation of the
Ruhr area in 1923, and the Soviet imposition of a satellite state in Eastern
Germany for a generation after the Second World War. When the Berlin Wall
came down in 1989, French President Mitterrand briefly toyed with the idea of
cooperating with Gorbachev to obstruct German unification. But Gorbachev was
too preoccupied with domestic problems to undertake such an adventure, and
France was not strong enough to attempt it alone. A similar French weakness
prevented the partitioning of Germany in 1918. Even if France had been up to
the task, its allies, especially America, would not have tolerated so crass a
violation of the principle of self-determination. But neither was Wilson prepared
to insist on a peace of reconciliation. In the end, he went along with several
punitive provisions contradicting the equal treatment promised in the Fourteen
Points.
The attempt to reconcile American idealism with France’s nightmares turned
out to be beyond human ingenuity. Wilson traded modification of the Fourteen
Points for the establishment of the League of Nations, to which he looked to
remedy any legitimate grievances left over from the peace treaty. France settled
for far fewer punitive measures than it thought commensurate with its sacrifices
in the hope of evoking a long-term American commitment to French security.
Ultimately, no country achieved its objective: Germany was not reconciled,
France was not made secure, and the United States withdrew from the
settlement.
Wilson was the star of the Peace Conference, which convened in Paris
between January and June 1919. In the days when travel to Europe took a week
by ship, many of Wilson’s advisers had warned that an American president could
not afford to be away from Washington for months on end. In fact, in Wilson’s
absence his strength in the Congress did deteriorate, proving especially costly
when the peace treaty came up for ratification. Wilson’s absence from
Washington aside, it is almost always a mistake for heads of state to undertake
the details of a negotiation. They are then obliged to master specifics normally
handled by their foreign offices and are deflected onto subjects more appropriate
to their subordinates, while being kept from issues only heads of state can
resolve. Since no one without a well-developed ego reaches the highest office,
compromise is difficult and deadlocks are dangerous. With the domestic
positions of the interlocutors so often dependent on at least the semblance of
success, negotiations more often concentrate on obscuring differences than they
do on dealing with the essence of a problem.
This proved to be Wilson’s fate at Paris. With every passing month, he was
drawn more deeply into haggling over details which had never concerned him
before. The longer he stayed, the more the sense of urgency to bring matters to a
conclusion overrode the desire to create an entirely new international order. The
final outcome was made inevitable by the procedure used to negotiate the peace
treaty. Because a disproportionate amount of time was spent adjusting territorial
questions, the League of Nations emerged as a sort of deus ex machina, to
straighten out later the ever-widening gap between Wilson’s moral claims and
the actual terms of the settlement.
The mercurial Welshman David Lloyd George, who represented Great Britain,
had, in the election campaign just before the Peace Conference, vowed that
Germany would be made to pay the full cost of the war and that ‘we will search
their pockets for it.” But, confronted by a volatile Germany and a fretful France,
he focused on maneuvering between Clemenceau and Wilson. In the end, he
went along with the punitive provisions, invoking the League as the mechanism
by which any inequities would later be corrected.
Arguing on behalf of France’s point of view was the battle-scarred and aged
Georges Clemenceau. Nicknamed “the Tiger,” he was a veteran of decades of
domestic battles, from the overthrow of Napoleon III to the vindication of
Captain Dreyfus. Yet, at the Paris Conference, he set himself a task that was
beyond even his ferocious capacities. Striving for a peace which would
somehow undo Bismarck’s work and reassert Richelieu-style primacy on the
Continent, he exceeded the tolerance of the international system and, indeed, the
capacities of his own society. The clock simply could not be turned back 150
years. No other nation either shared or fully grasped France’s objectives.
Frustration would prove to be Clemenceau’s lot, and progressive demoralization
France’s future.
Vittorio Orlando, the Italian Prime Minister, represented the last of the “Big
Four.” Though he cut a fine figure, he was frequently overshadowed by his
energetic Foreign Minister, Sidney Sonnino. The Italian negotiators, it turned
out, had come to Paris to collect their booty rather than to design a new world
order. The Allies had induced Italy into the war by promising it the South Tirol
and the Dalmatian coast in the Treaty of London of 1915. Since the South Tirol
was predominantly Austro-German and the Dalmatian coast Slavic, Italy’s
claims were in direct conflict with the principle of self-determination. Yet
Orlando and Sonnino deadlocked the Conference until, in utter exasperation,
South Tirol (though not Dalmatia) was turned over to Italy. This “compromise”
demonstrated that the Fourteen Points were not etched in stone, and opened the
floodgates to various other adjustments which, collectively, ran counter to the
prevailing principle of self-determination without either improving the old
balance of power or creating a new one.
Unlike the Congress of Vienna, the Paris Peace Conference did not include the
defeated powers. As a result, the months of negotiation cast the Germans
beneath a pall of uncertainty, which encouraged illusions. They recited Wilson’s
Fourteen Points as if by heart and, though their own peace program would have
been brutal, deluded themselves into believing that the Allies’ final settlement
would be relatively mild. Therefore, when the peacemakers revealed their
handiwork in June 1919, the Germans were shocked and embarked on two
decades of systematically undermining it.
Lenin’s Russia, which was also not invited, attacked the entire enterprise on
the ground that it was a capitalist orgy organized by countries whose ultimate
goal was to intervene in the civil war in Russia. Thus it happened that the peace
concluding the war to end all wars did not include the two strongest nations of
Europe—Germany and Russia—which, between them, contained well over half
of Europe’s population and by far the largest military potential. That fact alone
would have doomed the Versailles settlement.
Nor did its procedures encourage a comprehensive approach. The Big Four—
Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Orlando—were the dominant figures,
but they could not control the proceedings in the same way that the ministers of
the Great Powers had dominated the Congress of Vienna a hundred years earlier.
The negotiators at Vienna had concentrated above all on establishing a new
balance of power, for which the Pitt Plan had served as a general blueprint. The
leaders at Paris were constantly being diverted by an unending series of
sideshows.
Twenty-seven states were invited. Envisioned as a forum for all the peoples of
the world, the Conference, in the end, turned into a free-for-all. The Supreme
Council—composed of the heads of government of Great Britain, France, Italy,
and the United States—was the highest-ranking of the innumerable commissions
and sections making up the Conference. In addition, there was the Council of
Five, composed of the Supreme Council plus the head of government of Japan;
and a Council of Ten, which was the Council of Five and their foreign ministers.
Delegates from the smaller countries were free to address the more elite groups
about their various concerns. It underlined the democratic nature of the
Conference, but was also very time-consuming.
Since no agenda had been agreed upon prior to the Conference, delegates
arrived not knowing in what particular order the issues would be addressed.
Thus, the Paris Conference ended up having fifty-eight different committees.
Most of them dealt with territorial questions. A separate committee for each
country was established. Additionally, there were committees dealing with war
guilt and war criminals, with reparations, ports, waterways and railways, with
labor, and, finally, with the League of Nations. All together, the Conference’s
committee members sat through 1,646 meetings.
Endless discussions about peripheral subjects obscured the central fact that,
for the peace to be stable, the settlement had to have some overarching concept
—especially a long-term view about the future role of Germany. In theory, the
American principles of collective security and self-determination were to play
that role. In practice, the real issue at the Conference, and one which would
prove irresoluble, was the differences between the American concept of
international order and that of the Europeans, particularly the French. Wilson
rejected the idea that international conflicts had structural causes. Deeming
harmony to be natural, Wilson strove for institutions which would sweep away
the illusion of clashing interests and permit the underlying sense of world
community to assert itself.
France, the theater of many a European war and itself a participant in many
more, was not to be persuaded that clashing national interests were illusory, or
that there existed some nebulous, underlying harmony heretofore hidden from
mankind. Two German occupations in the course of fifty years had made France
obsessively fearful of another round of conquest. It would aspire to tangible
guarantees of its security and leave the moral improvement of mankind to others.
But tangible guarantees implied either a weakening of Germany or an assurance
that, in the event of another war, other countries, especially the United States and
Great Britain, would be on the side of France.
Since dismembering Germany was opposed by America, and collective
security was too nebulous for France, the only remaining solution to France’s
problem was an American and British pledge to defend it. And that, precisely,
was what both Anglo-Saxon countries were extremely reluctant to give. With no
such assurance forthcoming, France was reduced to pleading for expedients.
Geography protected America, and the surrender of the German fleet had
dispersed British concerns about control of the seas. France alone among the
victors was being asked to rest its security on world opinion. André Tardieu, a
principal French negotiator, argued that:
For France, as for Great Britain and the United States, it is necessary to create a zone of safety….
This zone the naval Powers create by their fleets, and by the elimination of the German fleet. This
zone France, unprotected by the ocean, unable to eliminate the millions of Germans trained to war,
must create by the Rhine, by an interallied occupation of that river.14
Yet France’s demand to separate the Rhineland from Germany ran up against the
American conviction that “such a peace would then be made as would be
contrary to everything we have stood for.”15 The American delegation argued
that separating the Rhineland from Germany and stationing Allied troops there
would engender a permanent German grievance. Philip Kerr, a British delegate,
told Tardieu that Great Britain considered an independent Rhenish state “a
source of complication and of weakness…. If local conflicts occur, whither will
they lead? If war results from these conflicts, neither England nor her Dominions
will have that deep feeling of solidarity with France which animated them in the
last war.”16
French leaders were far less worried about later German grievances than about
Germany’s ultimate power. Tardieu held his ground:
You say that England does not like English troops to be used away from home. It is a question of
fact. England has always had troops in India and Egypt. Why? Because she knows that her frontier is
not at Dover…. To ask us to give up occupation, is like asking England and the United States to sink
their fleet of battleships.17
If France was denied a buffer, it would need some other assurance, preferably an
alliance with Great Britain and the United States. If need be, France was
prepared to accept an interpretation of the concept of collective security to
achieve the same result as a traditional alliance.
Wilson was so eager to establish the League of Nations that he occasionally
put forward theories encouraging French hopes. On several occasions, Wilson
described the League as an international tribunal to adjudicate disputes, alter
boundaries, and infuse international relations with much-needed elasticity. One
of Wilson’s advisers, Dr. Isaiah Bowman, summed up Wilson’s ideas in a
memorandum drafted aboard the ship transporting them to the Peace Conference
in December 1918. The League would provide for:
…territorial integrity plus later alteration of terms and alteration of boundaries if it could be shown
that injustice had been done or that conditions had changed. And such alteration would be the easier
to make in time as passion subsided and matters could be viewed in the light of justice rather than in
the light of a peace conference at the close of a protracted war…. [The] opposite of such a course
was to maintain the idea of the Great Powers and of balance of power, and such an idea had always
produced only “aggression and selfishness and war.”18
After the plenary session of February 14, 1919, at which Wilson unveiled the
League Covenant, he spoke in nearly identical terms to his wife: “This is our
first real step forward, for I now realize, more than ever before, that once
established, the League can arbitrate and correct mistakes which are inevitable in
the treaty we are trying to make at this time.”19
As Wilson envisaged it, the League of Nations would have the dual mandate
of enforcing the peace and rectifying its inequities. Nevertheless, Wilson was
gripped by a profound ambivalence. It would have been impossible to find a
single historical example of European borders being changed by appeals to
justice or purely legal processes; in almost every instance, they had been altered
—or defended—in the name of the national interest. Yet Wilson was well aware
that the American people were not even remotely ready for a military
commitment in defense of the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles. In essence,
Wilson’s ideas translated into institutions tantamount to world government,
which the American people were even less prepared to accept than a global
police force.
Wilson sought to sidestep this problem by invoking world public opinion
rather than world government or military force as the ultimate sanction against
aggression. This is how he described it to the Peace Conference in February
1919:
…throughout this instrument [the League of Nations] we are depending primarily and chiefly upon
one great force, and that is the moral force of the public opinion of the world….20
And what public opinion could not resolve, economic pressure would surely
accomplish. According to the Bowman Memorandum:
In cases involving discipline there was the alternative to war, namely, the boycott; trade, including
postal and cable facilities, could be denied a state that had been guilty of wrongdoing.21
No European state had ever seen such mechanisms at work or could bring itself
to believe in their feasibility. In any case, it was too much to expect from France,
which had expended so much blood and treasure in order just barely to survive,
only to find itself faced with a vacuum in Eastern Europe and a Germany whose
actual strength was much greater than its own.
For France, therefore, the League of Nations had only one purpose, and that
was to activate military assistance against Germany should that be needed. An
ancient and by this time depleted country, France could not bring itself to trust in
the basic premise of collective security, that all nations would assess threats in
the same way or that, if they did, they would reach identical conclusions about
how to resist. If collective security failed, America—and perhaps Great Britain
—could always defend themselves, as a last resort, on their own. But for France,
there was no last resort; its judgment had to prove right the first time. If the basic
assumption of collective security turned out to be wrong, France, unlike
America, could not fight another traditional war; it would cease to exist. France
was therefore not seeking a general assurance, but a guarantee applicable to its
specific circumstances. This the American delegation resolutely refused to give.
Though Wilson’s reluctance to commit America to more than a declaration of
principles was understandable in light of his domestic pressures, it magnified
France’s forebodings. The United States had never hesitated to use force to back
up the Monroe Doctrine, which Wilson constantly invoked as a model for his
new international order. Yet America turned coy when the issue of German
threats to the European balance of power arose. Did this not signify that the
European equilibrium was a lesser security interest for the United States than
conditions in the Western Hemisphere? To remove this distinction, the French
representative on the relevant committee, Léon Bourgeois, kept pressing for an
international army or any other mechanism that would endow the League of
Nations with automatic enforcement machinery in case Germany abrogated the
Versailles settlement—the only cause of war that interested France.
For a fleeting moment, Wilson seemed to endorse the concept by referring to
the proposed Covenant as a guarantee of the “land titles of the world.”22 But
Wilson’s entourage was horrified. Its members knew that the Senate would never
ratify a standing international army or a permanent military commitment. One of
Wilson’s advisers even argued that a provision stipulating the use of force to
resist aggression would be unconstitutional:
A substantial objection to such a provision is that it would be void if contained in a treaty of the
United States, as Congress under the Constitution had the power to declare war. A war automatically
arising upon a condition subsequent, pursuant to a treaty provision, is not a war declared by
Congress.23
Taken literally, this meant that no alliance with the United States could ever have
binding force.
Wilson quickly tacked back to the undiluted doctrine of collective security. In
rejecting the French proposal, he described standby enforcement machinery as
unnecessary because the League itself would serve to inspire overwhelming
confidence around the world. He maintained that “the only method… lies in our
having confidence in the good faith of the nations who belong to the League….
When danger comes, we too will come, but you must trust us.”24
Trust is not a commodity in abundant supply among diplomats. When the
survival of nations is at stake, statesmen look for more tangible guarantees—
especially if a country is as precariously situated as France. The persuasiveness
of the American argument resided in the absence of an alternative; however
ambiguous the League obligations, they were still better than nothing. Lord
Cecil, one of the British delegates, was saying just that when he scolded Léon
Bourgeois for his threats not to join the League unless the Covenant was
endowed with enforcement machinery. “America,” Cecil told Bourgeois, “had
nothing to gain from the League of Nations;… she could let European affairs go
and take care of her own; the offer that was made by America for support was
practically a present to France….”25
Though beset by many doubts and premonitions, France finally yielded to the
painful logic of the Briton’s argument, and acceded to the tautology contained in
Article 10 of the League of Nations Charter: “The Council shall advise upon the
means by which this obligation [i.e., the preservation of territorial integrity] shall
be fulfilled.”26 That is, in case of an emergency, the League of Nations would
agree to that on which it could agree. This was, of course, what the nations of the
world would have typically done even if there had been no Covenant; and this
was precisely the circumstance which traditional alliances sought to remedy by
invoking the formal obligation of mutual assistance for specifically defined
circumstances.
A French memorandum bluntly stressed the inadequacy of the proposed
League security arrangements:
Suppose that instead of a defensive military understanding—very limited indeed—which was given
effect between Great Britain and France in 1914, there had been no other bond between the two
countries than the general agreements contained in the Covenant of the League, the British
intervention would have been less prompt and Germany’s victory thereby assured. So we believe
that, under present conditions, the aid provided for by the Covenant of the League would arrive too
late.27
Once it had become clear that America was refusing to incorporate any concrete
security provisions into the Covenant, France resumed its pressure for
dismembering Germany. It proposed the establishment of an independent
Rhenish republic as a demilitarized buffer zone, and sought to create an
incentive for such a state by exempting it from reparations. When the United
States and Great Britain balked, France suggested that, at a minimum, the
Rhineland be separated from Germany until the League’s institutions had had a
chance to develop and its enforcement machinery could be tested.
In an effort to placate France, Wilson and the British leaders offered as a
substitute for the dismemberment of Germany a treaty guaranteeing the new
settlement. America and Great Britain would agree to go to war if Germany
violated the settlement. It was very similar to the agreement that the allies at the
Congress of Vienna had created to reinsure themselves against France. But there
was one important difference: after the Napoleonic Wars, the allies had
genuinely believed in a French threat and sought to provide security against it;
after World War I, Great Britain and the United States did not really believe in a
German threat; they offered their guarantee without being either convinced that
it was necessary or particularly determined to implement it.
The principal French negotiator was jubilant, describing the British guarantee
as “unprecedented.” Great Britain had occasionally entered into temporary
agreements, he maintained, but had never previously submitted to a permanent
obligation: “She has at times lent her aid; she has never bound herself in advance
to give it.”28 Tardieu considered America’s proposed commitment an equally
momentous departure from its historic pattern of isolationism.29
In their eagerness for formal guarantees, French leaders overlooked the crucial
fact that the “unprecedented” Anglo-Saxon decisions were primarily a tactic to
induce France to abandon its demand that Germany be dismembered. In foreign
policy, the term “unprecedented” is always somewhat suspect, because the actual
range of innovation is so circumscribed by history, domestic institutions, and
geography.
Had Tardieu been privy to the American delegation’s reaction, he would have
understood how tenuous the guarantee really was. Wilson’s advisers were
unanimous in opposing their chief. Had not the new diplomacy been explicitly
created to do away with this type of national commitment? Had America fought
the war only to end up in a traditional alliance? House wrote in his diary:
I thought I ought to call the President’s attention to the perils of such a treaty. Among other things, it
would be looked upon as a direct blow at the League of Nations. The League is supposed to do just
what this treaty proposed, and if it were necessary for the nations to make such treaties, then why the
League of Nations?30
It was a fair question. For, if the League performed as advertised, the guarantee
was unnecessary; and if the guarantee was necessary, the League was not living
up to its design and all postwar concepts would be in doubt. The isolationists in
the United States Senate had misgivings of their own. They were not so much
worried that the guarantee conflicted with the League as that the devious
Europeans were luring America into the web of their corrupt ancient
entanglements. The guarantee did not last long. The Senate’s refusal to ratify the
Treaty of Versailles rendered it moot; and Great Britain jumped at the pretext to
release itself from its commitment as well. France’s abandonment of its claims
turned out to be permanent, and the guarantee ephemeral.
Out of all these crosscurrents finally emerged the Treaty of Versailles, named
after the Hall of Mirrors of Versailles Palace in which it was signed. The location
seemed to invite unnecessary humiliation. Fifty years earlier, Bismarck had
tactlessly proclaimed the unified Germany there; now, the victors inflicted an
insult of their own. Nor was their handiwork likely to calm the international
environment. Too punitive for conciliation, too lenient to keep Germany from
recovering, the treaty of Versailles condemned the exhausted democracies to
constant vigilance and to the need for permanent enforcement against an
irreconcilable and revisionist Germany.
The Fourteen Points notwithstanding, the Treaty was punitive in territorial,
economic, and military areas. Germany had to surrender 13 percent of its prewar
territory. Economically important Upper Silesia was handed over to a newly
created Poland, which also received an outlet to the Baltic Sea and the area
around Posen, thereby creating the “Polish Corridor” separating East Prussia
from the rest of Germany. The tiny territory of Eupen-et-Malmédy was given to
Belgium, and Alsace-Lorraine was returned to France.
Germany lost its colonies, the legal status of which occasioned a dispute
between Wilson on the one side and France, Great Britain, and Japan on the
other, all three of which wanted to annex their share of the spoils. Wilson
insisted that such a direct transfer would violate the principle of selfdetermination. The Allies finally arrived at the socalled Mandate Principle,
which was as ingenious as it was hypocritical. German colonies as well as
former Ottoman territories in the Middle East were assigned to the various
victors with a “mandate” under League supervision, to facilitate their
independence. What that meant was never specifically defined, nor in the end
did the mandates lead to independence any more rapidly than in other colonial
areas.
The Treaty’s military restrictions reduced the German army to 100,000
volunteers and its navy to six cruisers and a few smaller vessels. Germany was
forbidden to possess offensive weapons such as submarines, aircraft, tanks, or
heavy artillery, and its general staff was dissolved. To supervise German
disarmament, an Allied Military Control Commission was created and given, as
it turned out, extremely vague and ineffective authority.
Despite Lloyd George’s electioneering promise to “squeeze” Germany, the
Allies began to realize that an economically prostrate Germany might produce a
world economic crisis affecting their own societies. But the victorious
populations showed little interest in the warnings of theoretical economists. The
British and the French demanded that Germany indemnify their civilian
populations for all damages. Against his better judgment, Wilson finally agreed
to a provision that made Germany pay for the pensions of war victims and some
compensation for their families. Such a provision was unheard of; no previous
European peace treaty had ever contained such a clause. No figure was set for
these claims; it was to be determined at some later date, generating a source of
endless controversy.
Other economic penalties included immediate payment of $5 billion in cash or
in kind. France was to receive large quantities of coal as compensation for
Germany’s destruction of its mines during the occupation of eastern France. To
make up for ships sunk by German submarines, Great Britain was awarded much
of the German merchant fleet. Germany’s foreign assets, totaling about $7
billion, were seized, along with many German patents (thanks to the Versailles
Treaty, Bayer Aspirin is an American, not a German product). Germany’s major
rivers were internationalized, and its ability to raise tariffs was restricted.
These terms mortgaged the new international order instead of helping to
create it. When the victors assembled in Paris, they proclaimed a new era in
history. So eager were they to avoid what they considered the mistakes of the
Congress of Vienna that the British delegation commissioned the renowned
historian Sir Charles Webster to write a treatise on the subject.31 Yet what they
finally produced was a fragile compromise between American utopianism and
European paranoia—too conditional to fulfill the dreams of the former, too
tentative to alleviate the fears of the latter. An international order that can be
preserved only by force is precarious, all the more so when the countries which
must bear the principal burden for enforcement—in this case Great Britain and
France—were at odds.
It soon became apparent that, as a practical matter, the principle of selfdetermination could not be applied in the clearcut sort of way envisaged by the
Fourteen Points, especially among the successor states of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire. Czechoslovakia ended up with 3 million Germans, 1 million
Hungarians, and half a million Poles out of a population of some 15 million;
nearly a third of the total population was neither Czech nor Slovak. And
Slovakia was not an enthusiastic part of a Czech-dominated state, as it would
demonstrate by seceding in 1939 and again in 1992.
The new Yugoslavia fulfilled the aspirations of South Slavic intellectuals. But
to create that state, it was necessary to cross the fault line of European history,
which divided the Western and the Eastern Roman empires, the Catholic and the
Orthodox religions, the Latin and the Cyrillic scripts—a fault line running
roughly between Croatia and Serbia, which had never in their complex histories
belonged to the same political unit. The bill for this came due after 1941, in a
murderous civil war which started all over again in 1991.
Romania acquired millions of Hungarians, Poland millions of Germans and
the guardianship of a corridor separating East Prussia from the rest of Germany.
At the end of this process, which was conducted in the name of selfdetermination, nearly as many people lived under foreign rule as during the days
of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, except that now they were distributed across
many more, much weaker, nation-states which, to undermine stability even
further, were in conflict with each other.
When it was too late, Lloyd George understood the dilemma into which the
victorious Allies had maneuvered themselves. In a memorandum to Wilson
dated March 25, 1919, he wrote:
I can not conceive any greater cause of future war than that the German people, who have certainly
proved themselves one of the most vigorous and powerful races in the world should be surrounded
by a number of small states, many of them consisting of people who have never previously set up a
stable government for themselves, but each of them containing large masses of Germans clamouring
for reunion with their native land.32
But by then, the conference had already progressed too far toward its closing
date in June. Nor was any alternative principle for organizing the world order
available, now that the balance of power had been discarded.
Later on, many German leaders were to claim that their country had been
tricked into the Armistice by Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which were then
systematically violated. Such propositions were so much self-pitying nonsense.
Germany had ignored the Fourteen Points as long as it thought that it had a
chance of winning the war, and had, soon after the proclamation of the Fourteen
Points, imposed a Carthaginian peace on Russia at Brest-Litovsk, violating every
one of Wilson’s principles. The only reason Germany finally ended the war had
to do with pure power calculations—with the American army involved, its final
defeat was only a question of time. When it asked for an armistice, Germany was
exhausted, its defenses were breaking, and Allied armies were about to drive into
German territory. Wilson’s principles in fact spared Germany much more severe
retribution.
With better reason, historians have argued that it was the refusal of the United
States to join the League that doomed the Treaty of Versailles. America’s failure
to ratify the Treaty or the guarantee of French borders connected with it certainly
contributed to France’s demoralization. But, given the isolationist mood of the
country, American membership in the League or ratification of the guarantee
would not have made a significant difference. Either way, the United States
would not have used force to resist aggression, or else it would have defined
aggression in terms which did not apply to Eastern Europe—much as Great
Britain was to do in the 1930s.
The debacle of the Treaty of Versailles was structural. The century of peace
produced by the Congress of Vienna had been buttressed by three pillars, each of
which was indispensable: a peace of conciliation with France; a balance of
power; and a shared sense of legitimacy. The relatively conciliatory peace with
France would not in itself have prevented French revisionism. But France knew
that the Quadruple and Holy Alliances could always assemble superior power,
making French expansionism far too risky. At the same time, periodic European
congresses gave France an opportunity to participate in the Concert of Europe as
an equal. Above all, the major countries had shared common values so that
existing grievances did not coalesce into an attempt to overthrow the
international order.
The Treaty of Versailles fulfilled none of these conditions. Its terms were too
onerous for conciliation but not severe enough for permanent subjugation. In
truth, it was not easy to strike a balance between satisfying and subjugating
Germany. Having considered the prewar world order too confining, Germany
was not likely to be satisfied with any terms available after defeat.
France had three strategic choices: it could try to form an anti-German
coalition; it could seek to partition Germany; or it could try to conciliate
Germany. All attempts to form alliances failed because Great Britain and
America refused, and Russia was no longer part of the equilibrium. Partitioning
Germany was resisted by the same countries which rejected an alliance but on
whose support in an emergency France nevertheless had to rely. And it was both
too late and too early for the conciliation of Germany—too late because
conciliation was incompatible with the Treaty of Versailles, too early because
French public opinion was not yet ready for it.
Paradoxically, France’s vulnerability and Germany’s strategic advantage were
both magnified by the Treaty of Versailles despite its punitive provisions. Before
the war, Germany had faced strong neighbors in both the East and the West. It
could not expand in either direction without encountering a major state—France,
the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or Russia. But after the Treaty of Versailles, there
was no longer a counterweight to Germany in the East. With France weakened,
the Austro-Hungarian Empire dissolved, and Russia out of the picture for some
time, there was simply no way of reconstructing the old balance of power,
especially since the Anglo-Saxon powers refused to guarantee the Versailles
settlement.
As early as 1916, Lord Balfour, then British Foreign Secretary, foresaw at
least a part of the danger that lay ahead for Europe when he warned that an
independent Poland might leave France defenseless in another war: if “Poland
was made an independent kingdom, becoming a buffer state between Russia and
Germany, France would be at the mercy of Germany in the next war, for this
reason, that Russia could not come to her aid without violating the neutrality of
Poland”33—exactly the dilemma in 1939. To contain Germany, France needed an
ally in the East that could force Germany to fight a two-front war. Russia was the
only country strong enough to fulfill that role. But with Poland separating
Germany and Russia, Russia could only pressure Germany by violating Poland.
And Poland was too weak to play Russia’s role. What the Treaty of Versailles
did was to give an incentive to Germany and Russia to partition Poland,
precisely what they did twenty years later.
Lacking a Great Power in the East with which to ally itself, France sought to
strengthen the new states to create the illusion of a two-front challenge to
Germany. It backed the new East European states in their effort to extract more
territory from Germany or from what was left of Hungary. Obviously, the new
states had an incentive to encourage the French delusion that they might come to
serve as a counterweight to Germany. Yet these infant states could not possibly
assume the role that, up to this time, Austria and Russia had played. They were
too weak and racked by internal conflicts and mutual rivalries. And to their east
loomed a reconstituted Russia, seething over its own territorial losses. Once it
recovered its strength, Russia would prove as great a threat to the independence
of the small states as Germany.
Thus the stability of the Continent came to rest on France. It had taken the
combined forces of America, Great Britain, France, and Russia to subdue
Germany. Of these countries, America was again isolationist, and Russia was
severed from Europe by a revolutionary drama and by the socalled cordon
sanitaire of small Eastern European states standing in the way of direct Russian
assistance to France. To preserve the peace, France would have had to play
policeman all over Europe. Not only had it lost the stomach and the strength for
so interventionist a policy but, had it attempted one, it would have found itself
alone, abandoned by both America and Great Britain.
The most dangerous weakness of the Versailles settlement, however, was
psychological. The world order created by the Congress of Vienna had been
cemented by the principle of conservative unity that had meshed with the
requirements of the balance of power; in effect, the powers that were most
needed to maintain the settlement also considered it just. The Versailles
settlement was stillborn because the values it extolled clashed with the
incentives needed to enforce it: the majority of the states required to defend the
agreement considered it unjust in one way or another.
The paradox of the First World War was that it had been fought to curb
German power and looming predominance, and that it had aroused public
opinion to a pitch which prevented the establishment of a conciliatory peace.
Yet, in the end, Wilsonian principles inhibited a peace which curbed Germany’s
power and there was no shared sense of justice. The price for conducting foreign
policy on the basis of abstract principles is the impossibility of distinguishing
among individual cases. Since the leaders at Versailles were not willing to
reduce German power by either the implicit rights of victory or the calculations
of the balance of power, they were obliged to justify German disarmament as the
first installment of a general plan of disarmament, and reparations as an
expiation of guilt for the war itself.
In justifying German disarmament in this way, the Allies undermined the
psychological readiness that was required to sustain their agreement. From the
first, Germany could, and did, claim that it was being discriminated against, and
demanded that it either be permitted to rearm or that other nations disarm to its
level. In the process, the disarmament provisions of the Treaty of Versailles
ended up demoralizing the victors. At every disarmament conference, Germany
would seize the moral high ground, in which it was usually supported by Great
Britain. But if France did grant Germany equality in rearmament, the possibility
of safeguarding the independence of the nations of Eastern Europe would vanish.
The disarmament clauses were therefore bound to lead to either the disarmament
of France or the rearmament of Germany. In neither case would France be strong
enough to defend Eastern Europe or, in the long run, even itself.
Similarly, the prohibition against the union of Austria and Germany violated
the principle of self-determination, as did the presence of a large German
minority in Czechoslovakia and, to a lesser extent, of a German minority in
Poland. German irredentism was thus supported by the organizing principle of
the Treaty of Versailles, compounding the guilty conscience of the democracies.
The gravest psychological blight on the Treaty was Article 231, the socalled
War Guilt clause. It stated that Germany was solely responsible for the outbreak
of World War I, and delivered a severe moral censure. Most of the punitive
measures against Germany in the Treaty—economic, military, and political—
were based on the assertion that the whole conflagration had been entirely
Germany’s fault.
Eighteenth-century peacemakers would have regarded “war guilt clauses” as
absurd. For them, wars were amoral inevitabilities caused by clashing interests.
In the treaties that concluded eighteenth-century wars, the losers paid a price
without its being justified on moral grounds. But for Wilson and the
peacemakers at Versailles, the cause of the war of 1914–18 had to be ascribed to
some evil which had to be punished.
When the hatreds had diminished, however, astute observers began to see that
responsibility for the outbreak of the war was far more complicated. To be sure,
Germany bore a heavy responsibility, but was it fair to single out Germany for
punitive measures? Was Article 231 really proper? Once this question began
being asked, especially in Great Britain in the 1920s, the will to enforce the
punitive measures against Germany contained in the Treaty began to waver. The
peacemakers, assailed by their own consciences, wondered if what they had
wrought was fair, and this fostered a lack of resolve in maintaining the Treaty.
Germany, of course, was irresponsible on this issue. In German public discourse,
Article 231 became known as the “War Guilt Lie.” The physical difficulty of
establishing a balance of power was matched by the psychological difficulty of
creating a moral equilibrium.
Thus, the framers of the Versailles settlement achieved the precise opposite of
what they had set out to do. They had tried to weaken Germany physically but
instead strengthened it geopolitically. From a long-term point of view, Germany
was in a far better position to dominate Europe after Versailles than it had been
before the war. As soon as Germany threw off the shackles of disarmament,
which was just a matter of time, it was bound to emerge more powerful than
ever. Harold Nicolson summed it up: “We came to Paris confident that the new
order was about to be established; we left it convinced that the new order had
merely fouled the old.”34
CHAPTER TEN
The Dilemmas of the Victors
The policing of the Versailles agreement was based on two general concepts
which canceled each other out. The first failed because it was too sweeping, the
second, because it was too grudging. The concept of collective security was so
general as to prove inapplicable to circumstances most likely to disturb the
peace; the informal Franco-English cooperation which replaced it was far too
tenuous and ambivalent to resist major German challenges. And before five
years had elapsed, the two powers vanquished in the war came together at
Rapallo. The growing cooperation between Germany and the Soviet Union was a
crucial blow to the Versailles system, something the democracies were too
demoralized to grasp immediately.
At the end of the First World War, the age-old debate about the relative roles
of morality and interest in international affairs seemed to have been resolved in
favor of the dominance of law and ethics. Under the shock of the cataclysm,
many hoped for a better world as free as possible from the kind of Realpolitik
which, in their view, had decimated the youth of a generation. America emerged
as the catalyst of this process even as it was withdrawing into isolationism.
Wilson’s legacy was that Europe embarked on the Wilsonian course of trying to
preserve stability via collective security rather than the traditional European
approach of alliances and the balance of power, despite the absence of America.
In subsequent American usage, alliances in which America participated (such
as NATO) were generally described as instruments of collective security. This is
not, however, how the term was originally conceived, for in their essence, the
concepts of collective security and of alliances are diametrically opposed.
Traditional alliances were directed against specific threats and defined precise
obligations for specific groups of countries linked by shared national interests or
mutual security concerns. Collective security defines no particular threat,
guarantees no individual nation, and discriminates against none. It is
theoretically designed to resist any threat to the peace, by whoever might pose it
and against whomever it might be directed. Alliances always presume a specific
potential adversary; collective security defends international law in the abstract,
which it seeks to sustain in much the same way that a judicial system upholds a
domestic criminal code. It no more assumes a particular culprit than does
domestic law. In an alliance, the casus belli is an attack on the interests or the
security of its members. The casus belli of collective security is the violation of
the principle of “peaceful” settlement of disputes in which all peoples of the
world are assumed to have a common interest. Therefore, force has to be
assembled on a case-by-case basis from a shifting group of nations with a mutual
interest in “peacekeeping.”
The purpose of an alliance is to produce an obligation more predictable and
precise than an analysis of national interest. Collective security works in the
exact opposite way. It leaves the application of its principles to the interpretation
of particular circumstances when they arise, unintentionally putting a large
premium on the mood of the moment and, hence, on national self-will.
Collective security contributes to security only if all nations—or at least all
nations relevant to collective defense—share nearly identical views about the
nature of the challenge and are prepared to use force or apply sanctions on the
“merits” of the case, regardless of the specific national interest they may have in
the issues at hand. Only if these conditions are fulfilled can a world organization
devise sanctions or act as an arbiter of international affairs. This was how Wilson
had perceived the role of collective security as the end of the war approached in
September 1918:
National purposes have fallen more and more into the background and the common purpose of
enlightened mankind has taken their place. The counsels of plain men have become on all hands
more simple and straightforward and more unified than the counsels of sophisticated men of affairs,
who still retain the impression that they are playing a game of power and playing for high stakes.1
The fundamental difference between the Wilsonian and the European
interpretations of the causes of international conflict is reflected in these words.
European-style diplomacy presumes that national interests have a tendency to
clash, and views diplomacy as the means for reconciling them; Wilson, on the
other hand, considered international discord the result of “clouded thinking,” not
an expression of a genuine clash of interests. In the practice of Realpolitik,
statesmen shoulder the task of relating particular interests to general ones
through a balance of incentives and penalties. In the Wilsonian view, statesmen
are required to apply universal principles to specific cases. Moreover, statesmen
are generally treated as the causes of conflict, because they are believed to
distort man’s natural bent toward harmony with abstruse and selfish calculations.
The conduct of most statesmen at Versailles belied Wilsonian expectations.
Without exception, they stressed their national interests, leaving the defense of
the common purposes to Wilson, whose country in fact had no national interest
(in the European sense) in the territorial issues of the settlement. It is in the
nature of prophets to redouble their efforts, not to abandon them, in the face of a
recalcitrant reality. The obstacles Wilson encountered at Versailles raised no
doubt in his mind about the feasibility of his new dispensation. On the contrary,
they fortified his faith in its necessity. And he was confident that the League and
the weight of world opinion would correct the many provisions of the Treaty that
departed from his principles.
Indeed, the power of Wilson’s ideals was demonstrated by their impact on
Great Britain, the motherland of the balance-of-power policy. The official British
commentary on the League Covenant declared that “the ultimate and most
effective sanction must be the public opinion of the civilised world.”2 Or, as
Lord Cecil argued before the House of Commons, “what we rely upon is public
opinion… and if we are wrong about it, then the whole thing is wrong.”3
It seems improbable that the scions of the policy of Pitt, Canning, Palmerston,
and Disraeli would have come to such conclusions on their own. At first they
went along with Wilson’s policy in order to ensure American support in the war.
As time went on, Wilsonian principles succeeded in capturing British public
opinion. By the 1920s and 1930s, Great Britain’s defense of collective security
was no longer tactical. Wilsonianism had made a genuine convert.
In the end, collective security fell prey to the weakness of its central premise
—that all nations have the same interest in resisting a particular act of aggression
and are prepared to run identical risks in opposing it. Experience has shown
these assumptions to be false. No act of aggression involving a major power has
ever been defeated by applying the principle of collective security. Either the
world community has refused to assess the act as one which constituted
aggression, or it has disagreed over the appropriate sanctions. And when
sanctions were applied, they inevitably reflected the lowest common
denominator, often proving so ineffectual that they did more harm than good.
At the time of the Japanese conquest of Manchuria in 1932, the League had no
machinery for sanctions. It remedied this defect, but faced with Italian
aggression against Abyssinia, it voted for sanctions while stopping short of
imposing a cutoff of oil with the slogan “All sanctions short of war.” When
Austria was forcibly united with Germany and Czechoslovakia’s freedom was
extinguished, there was no League reaction at all. The last act of the League of
Nations, which no longer contained Germany, Japan, or Italy, was to expel the
Soviet Union after it attacked Finland in 1939. It had no effect on Soviet actions.
During the Cold War, the United Nations proved equally ineffective in every
case involving Great Power aggression, due to either the communist veto in the
Security Council or the reluctance on the part of smaller countries to run risks on
behalf of issues they felt did not concern them. The United Nations was
ineffective or at the sidelines during the Berlin crises and during the Soviet
interventions in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan. It was irrelevant in
the Cuban Missile Crisis until the two superpowers agreed to settle. America
was able to invoke the authority of the United Nations against North Korean
aggression in 1950 only because the Soviet representative was boycotting the
Security Council and the General Assembly was still dominated by countries
eager to enlist America against the threat of Soviet aggression in Europe. The
United Nations did provide a convenient meeting place for diplomats and a
useful forum for the exchange of ideas. It also performed important technical
functions. But it failed to fulfill the underlying premise of collective security—
the prevention of war and collective resistance to aggression.
This has been true of the United Nations even in the post–Cold War period. In
the Gulf War of 1991, it did indeed ratify American actions, but resistance to
Iraqi aggression was hardly an application of the doctrine of collective security.
Not waiting for an international consensus, the United States had unilaterally
dispatched a large expeditionary force. Other nations could gain influence over
America’s actions only by joining what was in effect an American enterprise;
they could not avoid the risks of conflict by vetoing it. Additionally, domestic
upheavals in the Soviet Union and China gave the permanent members of the
UN Security Council an incentive to maintain America’s goodwill. In the Gulf
War, collective security was invoked as a justification of American leadership,
not as a substitute for it.
Of course, these lessons had not yet been learned in the innocent days when
the concept of collective security was first being introduced into diplomacy. The
post-Versailles statesmen had half-convinced themselves that armaments were
the cause of tensions, not the result of them, and half-believed that if goodwill
replaced the suspiciousness of traditional diplomacy, international conflict might
be eradicated. Despite having been emotionally drained by the war, the European
leaders should have realized that a general doctrine of collective security could
never work, even if it overcame all the other hurdles it faced, as long as it
excluded three of the most powerful nations of the world: the United States,
Germany, and the Soviet Union. For the United States had refused to join the
League, Germany was barred from it, and the Soviet Union, which was treated
as a pariah, disdained it.
The country suffering most grievously under the postwar order was
“victorious” France. French leaders knew that the provisions of the Treaty of
Versailles would not keep Germany permanently weak. After the last European
war—the Crimean War of 1854–56—the victors, Great Britain and France, had
managed to maintain the military provisions for less than twenty years. In the
wake of the Napoleonic Wars, France became a full-fledged member of the
European Concert after only three years. After Versailles, France’s decline vis-àvis Germany grew progressively more evident, even as it seemed to dominate
Europe militarily. France’s victorious Commander-in-Chief, Marshal Ferdinand
Foch, was right when he said about the Treaty of Versailles: “This is not peace; it
is an Armistice for twenty years.”4
By 1924, the staff of the British ground forces had reached the same
conclusion when it predicted that Germany would again be going to war with
Great Britain over issues that would be “simply a repetition of the conditions
which brought us into the late war.”5 The restraints imposed by the Treaty of
Versailles, it argued, would delay German rearmament by at most nine months
once Germany felt strong enough politically to throw off the shackles of
Versailles—which the general staff presciently assessed as being probable within
ten years. Concurring with the analysis of the French, the British general staff
also predicted that France would be helpless unless, in the meantime, it made a
military alliance with “first-class powers.”
Yet the only first-class power available was Great Britain, whose political
leaders did not accept the views of their military advisers. Instead, their policy
was based on the mistaken belief that France was already too powerful and that
the last thing it needed was a British alliance. Great Britain’s leaders considered
demoralized France to be the potentially dominant power and in need of being
balanced, while revisionist Germany was perceived as the aggrieved party in
need of conciliation. Both assumptions—that France was militarily dominant
and that Germany had been harshly treated—were correct in the short term; but
as premises of British policy, they were disastrous in the long term. Statesmen
stand or fall on their perceptions of trends. And British postwar leaders failed to
perceive the long-range dangers before them.
France desperately wanted a military alliance with Great Britain, to replace
the guarantee that had lapsed when the United States Senate refused to ratify the
Versailles Treaty. Never having made a military alliance with the country they
considered to be the strongest in Europe, British leaders now perceived France
as rekindling its historic threat to dominate the Continent. In 1924, the Central
Department of the British Foreign Office described the French occupation of the
Rhineland as a “jumping-off point for an incursion into Central Europe,”6 a
judgment totally at variance with French psychology of the period. Even more
inanely, the Foreign Office memorandum treated the occupation of the
Rhineland as an encirclement of Belgium, creating “a direct menace to the
Scheldt and Zuider Zee, and therefore an indirect menace to this country.”7 Not
to be outdone in generating anti-French suspicions, the Admiralty weighed in
with an argument straight from the wars of the Spanish Succession or the
Napoleonic Wars: that the Rhineland dominated Dutch and Belgian ports whose
control would severely impair the British Royal Navy’s planning in the event of
war with France.8
There was no hope whatsoever of maintaining a balance of power in Europe
so long as Great Britain considered the primary threat to be a country whose
nearly panicky foreign policy was geared to fending off another German assault.
Indeed, in a kind of historic reflex, many in Great Britain began to look to
Germany to balance France. For example, the British Ambassador in Berlin,
Viscount d’Abernon, reported that it was in England’s interest to maintain
Germany as a counterweight to France. “As long as Germany is a coherent
whole, there is more or less a balance of power in Europe,” he wrote in 1923. If
Germany disintegrated, France would be “in undisputed military and political
control, based upon her army and her military alliances.”9 This was true enough
but hardly the likely scenario that British diplomacy would confront in the
decades ahead.
Great Britain was right to argue, as it always had, that, after victory, the
reconstruction of international order required the return of the erstwhile enemy
to the community of nations. But appeasing Germany’s grievances would not
restore stability as long as the balance of power continued to shift inexorably in
Germany’s direction. France and Great Britain, whose unity was essential to
maintaining the last shred of the European balance of power, were glaring at
each other in frustration and incomprehension, while the real threats to the
equilibrium—Germany and the Soviet Union—stood at the sidelines in sullen
resentment. Great Britain vastly exaggerated France’s strength; France vastly
overestimated its ability to use the Treaty of Versailles to compensate for its
growing inferiority vis-à-vis Germany. Great Britain’s fear of possible French
hegemony on the Continent was absurd; France’s belief that it could conduct
foreign policy on the basis of keeping Germany prostrate was delusion tinged by
despair.
Perhaps the most important reason for Great Britain’s rejection of a French
alliance was that its leaders did not in their hearts consider the Versailles Treaty
just, least of all the settlement of Eastern Europe, and feared that an alliance with
France, which had pacts with the Eastern European countries, might draw them
into a conflict over the wrong issues and in defense of the wrong countries.
Lloyd George expressed the conventional wisdom of that time:
The British people… would not be ready to be involved in quarrels which might arise regarding
Poland or Danzig of Upper Silesia… The British people felt that the populations of that quarter of
Europe were unstable and excitable; they might start fighting at any time and the rights and wrongs
of the dispute might be very hard to disentangle.10
Holding attitudes such as these, British leaders used discussions about the
possibility of a French alliance primarily as a tactical device to ease French
pressures on Germany, not as a serious contribution to international security.
France thus continued its hopeless quest of keeping Germany weak; Great
Britain sought to devise security arrangements to calm French fears without
incurring a British commitment. It was a circle never to be squared, for Great
Britain could not bring itself to extend to France the one assurance that might
have brought about a calmer and more conciliatory French foreign policy toward
Germany—a full military alliance.
Realizing in 1922 that the British Parliament would never countenance a
formal military commitment, French Prime Minister Briand reverted to the
precedent of the Entente Cordiale of 1904—Anglo-French diplomatic
cooperation without military provisions. But in 1904, Great Britain had felt
threatened by Germany’s naval program and by its constant bullying. By the
1920s, it feared Germany less than France, whose conduct it mistakenly
attributed to arrogance rather than to panic. Though Great Britain grudgingly
acceded to Briand’s proposal, its real motive in doing so was reflected in a
cynical Cabinet note which defended the French alliance as a means of
strengthening Great Britain’s relations with Germany:
Germany is to us the most important country in Europe not only on account of our trade with her, but
also because she is the key to the situation in Russia. By helping Germany we might under existing
conditions expose ourselves to the charge of deserting France; but if France was our ally no such
charge could be made.11
Whether it was because French President Alexandre Millerand sensed the British
evasion or simply found the arrangement too amorphous, he rejected Briand’s
scheme, which led to the Prime Minister’s resignation.
Frustrated in its attempt to elicit a traditional British alliance, France next
attempted to achieve the same result through the League of Nations by
elaborating a precise definition of aggression. This would then be turned into a
precise obligation within the framework of the League of Nations—thereby
transforming the League into a global alliance. In September 1923, at French and
British urging, the League Council devised a universal treaty of mutual
assistance. In the event of conflict, the Council would be empowered to
designate which country was the aggressor and which the victim. Every League
member would then be obliged to assist the victim, by force if necessary, on the
continent on which that signatory was situated (this clarification was added to
avoid incurring a League obligation to help in colonial conflicts). Since
obligations of the doctrine of collective security are meant to derive from general
causes rather than from national interests, the treaty stipulated that, to be eligible
for assistance, the victim must have previously signed a disarmament agreement
approved by the League, and have been reducing its armed forces according to
an agreed schedule.
Since the victim is usually the weaker side, the League’s Treaty of Mutual
Assistance was in fact providing incentives for aggression by asking the more
vulnerable side to compound its difficulties. There was something absurd about
the proposition that the international order would henceforth be defended on
behalf of excellent disarmers rather than of vital national interests. Moreover,
since reduction schedules of a general disarmament treaty would take years to
negotiate, the universal Treaty of Mutual Assistance was creating a vast vacuum.
With the League obligation to resist being placed into a distant and nebulous
future, France and any other threatened country would have to face their perils
alone.
Despite its escape clauses, the Treaty failed to command support. The United
States and the Soviet Union refused to consider it. Germany’s opinion was never
solicited. Once it became clear that the draft treaty would have obliged Great
Britain, with colonies on every continent, to assist any victim of aggression
anywhere, Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald also felt obliged to report
that Great Britain could not accept the Treaty, even though it had helped to draft
it.
By now, France’s quest for security had turned obsessive. Far from accepting
the futility of its effort, it refused to abandon its search for criteria compatible
with collective security, especially since the British government under Ramsay
MacDonald so strongly supported collective security and disarmament—the
socalled progressive causes represented by the League. Finally, MacDonald and
the new French Prime Minister, Edouard Herriot, came up with a variation of the
previous proposal. The Geneva Protocol of 1924 required League arbitration for
all international conflicts and established three criteria for a universal obligation
to assist victims of aggression: the aggressor’s refusal to permit the Council to
settle the dispute by conciliation; the aggressor’s failure to submit the issue to
judicial settlement or arbitration; and, of course, the victim’s membership in a
scheme for general disarmament. Each signatory was obliged to assist the victim
by all available means against the aggressor so defined.12
The Geneva Protocol, however, failed as well for the same reason as the
Treaty of Mutual Assistance and all the other schemes for collective security in
the 1920s had failed. It went too far for Great Britain and not nearly far enough
for France. Great Britain had proposed it in order to draw France into
disarmament, not to generate an additional defense obligation. France had
pursued the Protocol primarily as an obligation of mutual assistance—having
only a secondary interest, if that, in disarmament. To underscore the futility of
this exercise, the United States announced that it would not honor the Geneva
Protocol or tolerate any interference with U.S. trade under its provisions. When
the chairman of the British Imperial Defense Staff warned that the Protocol
would dangerously overextend British forces, the Cabinet withdrew it in early
1925.
It was a preposterous state of affairs. Resisting aggression had been made
dependent on the prior disarmament of the victim. Geopolitical considerations
and the strategic importance of the region, reasons for which nations had been
going to war for centuries, were being deprived of legitimacy. According to this
approach, Great Britain would defend Belgium because it had disarmed, not
because it was strategically vital. After months of negotiations, the democracies
were advancing neither disarmament nor security. The tendency of collective
security to transform aggression into an abstract, legal problem and its refusal to
consider any specific threat or commitment had a demoralizing rather than a
reassuring effect.
Despite the passionate lip service it paid to the concept, Great Britain clearly
considered the obligations of collective security less binding than those of
traditional alliances. For the Cabinet proved to be quite fertile in inventing
various formulae for collective security while it adamantly rejected a formal
alliance with France until the very eve of the war, a decade and a half later.
Surely it would not have made such a distinction unless it viewed the obligations
of collective security as less likely to have to be implemented or easier to evade
than those of alliances.
The wisest course for the Allies would have been to relieve Germany
voluntarily of the most onerous provisions of Versailles and to forge a firm
Franco-British alliance. This is what Winston Churchill had in mind when he
advocated an alliance with France “if (and only if) she entirely alters her
treatment of Germany and loyally accepts a British policy of help and friendship
towards Germany.”13 Such a policy was never pursued with any consistency,
however. French leaders were too afraid of both Germany and their own public
opinion, which was deeply hostile to Germany, and British leaders were too
suspicious of French designs.
The disarmament provisions of the Treaty of Versailles widened the AngloFrench split. Ironically, they eased Germany’s road toward military parity,
which, given the weakness of Eastern Europe, would spell geopolitical
superiority in the long run. For one thing, the Allies had compounded
discrimination with incompetence by neglecting to set up any verification
machinery for the disarmament provisions. In a letter to Colonel House in 1919,
André Tardieu, a principal French negotiator at Versailles, predicted that the
failure to set up verification machinery would cripple the disarmament clauses of
the Treaty:
…a weak instrument is being drawn up, dangerous and absurd…. Will the League say to Germany,
‘Prove that my information is false,’ or even, ‘We wish to verify.’ But then it is claiming a right of
supervision, and Germany will reply: ‘By what right?’
That is what Germany will reply and she will be justified in so replying, if she is not forced by the
Treaty to recognize the right of verification.14
In the innocent days before the study of arms control had become an academic
subject, no one thought it odd to be asking Germany to verify its own
disarmament. To be sure, an InterAllied Military Control Commission had been
set up. But it had no independent right of inspection; it could only ask the
German government for information about German violations—not exactly a
foolproof procedure. The Commission was disbanded in 1926, leaving the
verification of German compliance to Allied intelligence services. No wonder
the disarmament provisions were being grossly violated long before Hitler
refused to carry them out.
On the political level, German leaders skillfully insisted on the general
disarmament promised in the Versailles Treaty, of which their own disarmament
was to have been the first stage. With the passage of time, they managed to
obtain British support for this proposition, and used it as well to justify the
failure to fulfill other provisions of the Treaty. To put pressure on France, Great
Britain announced dramatic reductions of its own ground forces (on which it had
never relied for security), though not of its navy (on which, of course, it did).
France’s security, on the other hand, depended totally on its standing army’s
being significantly larger than Germany’s because the industrial potential of
Germany and its population were so superior. The pressure to alter this balance
—through either German rearmament or French disarmament—had the practical
consequence of reversing the results of the war. By the time Hitler came to
power, it was already quite apparent that the disarmament provisions of the
Treaty would soon be in tatters, making Germany’s geopolitical advantage
apparent.
Reparations were another element of the disunity between France and Great
Britain. Until the Versailles Treaty, it had been axiomatic that the vanquished
paid reparations. After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, Germany did not feel
compelled to invoke any principle other than its victory for the indemnity it
imposed on France; nor did it do so in 1918 with respect to the staggering
reparations bill it presented to Russia in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
Yet, in the new world order of Versailles, the Allies had come to believe that
reparations required a moral justification. They found it in Article 231, or the
War Guilt Clause, described in the previous chapter. The clause was furiously
attacked in Germany, and eliminated the already low incentive there to cooperate
with the peace settlement.
One of the astonishing aspects of the Versailles Treaty was that its drafters
included so invidious and precise a clause on war guilt without specifying the
total amount to be paid in reparations. The determination of the reparations
figure had been left to future expert commissions because the amount which the
Allies had led their publics to expect was so exorbitant, it could never have
survived Wilson’s scrutiny or the analysis of serious financial experts.
In this manner, reparations, like disarmament, became a weapon of the
German revisionists; experts increasingly doubted not only the morality but the
feasibility of the claims. John Maynard Keynes’ Treatise on the Economic
Consequences of the Peace was a prime example.15 Finally, the bargaining
position of the victor always diminishes with time. Whatever is not exacted
during the shock of defeat becomes increasingly difficult to attain later—a lesson
America had to learn with respect to Iraq at the end of the 1991 Gulf War.
It was not until 1921—two years after the signing of the Versailles Treaty—
that a figure for reparations was finally established. It was absurdly high: 132
billion Goldmarks (some $40 billion, which amounts to approximately $323
billion in present value), a sum which would have necessitated German
payments for the rest of the century. Predictably, Germany claimed insolvency;
even if the international financial system could have accommodated such a vast
transfer of resources, no democratic German government could have survived
agreeing to it.
In the summer of 1921, Germany paid the first installment of the reparations
bill, transferring 1 billion Marks ($250 million). But it did so by printing paper
Marks and selling them for foreign currency on the open market—in other
words, by inflating its currency to the point where no significant transfer of
resources was taking place. At the end of 1922, Germany proposed a four-year
moratorium on reparations.
The demoralization of the Versailles international order and of France, its
leading European pillar, was now far advanced. No enforcement machinery
existed for reparations, and no verification machinery for disarmament. Since
France and Great Britain disagreed on both issues, Germany was disgruntled,
and the United States and the Soviet Union were out of the picture, Versailles
had in effect led to a kind of international guerrilla war rather than to world
order. Four years after the Allied victory, Germany’s bargaining position was
becoming stronger than that of France. In this atmosphere, British Prime
Minister Lloyd George called for an international conference to meet at Genoa in
April 1922 in a sensible attempt to discuss reparations, war debts, and European
recovery as a package—much as the Marshall Plan would do a generation later.
Since it was impossible to conceive of European economic recovery without the
two largest Continental countries (which also happened to be the principal
debtors), Germany and the Soviet Union, the two pariahs of European
diplomacy, were invited to an international conference for the first time in the
postwar period. The result was not the contribution to international order of
Lloyd George’s hopes, but an opportunity for the two outcasts to come together.
Nothing remotely resembling the Soviet Union had appeared on the horizon of
European diplomacy since the French Revolution. For the first time in over a
century, a country had dedicated itself officially to overthrowing the established
order. The French revolutionaries had striven to change the character of the state;
the Bolsheviks, going a step further, proposed to abolish the state altogether.
Once the state had withered away, in Lenin’s phrase, there would be no need for
diplomacy or foreign policy.
At first, this attitude unsettled both the Bolsheviks and those with whom they
were obliged to deal. The early Bolsheviks had developed theories of class
struggle and imperialism as causes of war. However, they never dealt with the
question of how to conduct foreign policy among sovereign states. They were
certain that world revolution would follow their victory in Russia in a few
months’ time; extreme pessimists thought it might take as long as a few years.
Leon Trotsky, the first Soviet Foreign Minister, viewed his task as little more
than that of a clerk who, in order to discredit the capitalists, would make public
the various secret treaties by which they had proposed to divide the spoils of the
war amongst themselves. He defined his role as being to “issue a few
revolutionary proclamations to the peoples of the world and then shut up
shop.”16 None of the early communist leaders thought it possible that a
communist state could coexist with capitalist countries for decades. Since after a
few months or years the state was expected to disappear altogether, the principal
task of early Soviet foreign policy was believed to be the encouragement of
world revolution, not the management of relations among states.
In such an environment, the exclusion of the Soviet Union from the
peacemaking at Versailles was understandable. The Allies had no incentive to
involve in their deliberations a country that had already made a separate peace
with Germany, and whose agents were trying to overthrow their governments.
Nor did Lenin and his colleagues have any desire to participate in the
international order they were seeking to destroy.
Nothing in their endless, abstruse internal debates had prepared the early
Bolsheviks for the state of war they had in fact inherited. They had no specific
peace program because they did not think of their country as a state, only as a
cause. They therefore acted as if ending the war and promoting European
revolution were the same process. Indeed, their first foreign-policy decree,
issued the day after the 1917 Revolution, was the socalled Decree on Peace—an
appeal to governments and peoples of the world for what they described as a
democratic peace.17
Bolshevik illusions crumbled quickly. The German High Command agreed to
negotiations for a peace treaty at Brest-Litovsk and to an armistice while talks
were taking place. At first, Trotsky imagined that he would be able to use the
threat of world revolution as a bargaining weapon, and to act as a kind of
attorney for the proletariat. Unfortunately for Trotsky, the German negotiator
was a victorious general, not a philosopher. Max Hoffmann, Chief of Staff of the
Eastern front, understood the balance of forces and put forward brutal terms in
January 1918. He demanded the annexation of the entire Baltic area, a slice of
Belorussia, a de facto protectorate over an independent Ukraine, and a huge
indemnity. Tiring of Trotsky’s procrastination, Hoffmann finally produced a map
with a broad blue line showing the Germans’ demands, and made it clear that
Germany would not retire behind that line until Russia had demobilized—in
other words, until it was defenseless.
Hoffmann’s ultimatum generated the first significant communist debate on
foreign policy, which began in January 1918. Supported by Stalin, Lenin urged
appeasement; Bukharin advocated revolutionary war. Lenin argued that, if a
German revolution did not occur or it failed, Russia would suffer a “smashing
defeat,” leading to an even more disadvantageous peace, “a peace moreover
which would be concluded not by a Socialist government, but by some other….
Such being the state of affairs, it would be absolutely impermissible tactics to
stake the fate of the Socialist revolution which has begun in Russia merely on
the chance that the German revolution may begin in the immediate future.”18
Arguing on behalf of an essentially ideological foreign policy, Trotsky
advocated the policy of “no war, no peace.”19 Yet the weaker side has the option
of playing for time only against an adversary that considers negotiations as
operating according to their own internal logic—an illusion to which the United
States has been especially subject. The Germans had no such views. When
Trotsky returned with instructions proclaiming a policy of neither peace nor war
and announced unilaterally that the war was over, the Germans resumed military
operations. Faced with total defeat, Lenin and his colleagues accepted
Hoffmann’s terms and signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, accepting coexistence
with imperial Germany.
The principle of coexistence would be invoked time and again over the next
sixty years by the Soviets, with the reactions of the protagonists remaining
constant: the democracies would each time hail the Soviet proclamation of
peaceful coexistence as a sign of conversion to a permanent policy of peace. Yet,
for their part, communists always justified periods of peaceful coexistence on the
ground that the relation of forces was not conducive to confrontation. The
obvious corollary was that, as that relationship changed, so would the
Bolsheviks’ devotion to peaceful coexistence. According to Lenin, it was reality
which dictated coexistence with the capitalist foe:
By concluding a separate peace, we are freeing ourselves in the largest measure possible at the
present moment from both warring imperialist groups; by utilizing their mutual enmity we utilize the
war, which makes a bargain between them against us difficult.20
The high point of that policy was, of course, the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939.
Potential inconsistencies were easily rationalized. “We are convinced,” said a
communist statement, “that the most consistent socialist policy can be reconciled
with the sternest realism and most level-headed practicality.”21
In 1920, Soviet policy took the final step in acknowledging the need for a
more traditional policy toward the West when Foreign Minister Georgi Chicherin
said:
There may be differences of opinion as to the duration of the capitalist system, but at present the
capitalist system exists, so that a modus vivendi must be found….22
Despite the revolutionary rhetoric, in the end national interest emerged as a
dominant Soviet goal, becoming elevated into a socialist verity just as it had
stood for so long at the core of the policies of the capitalist states. Survival was
now the immediate goal and coexistence the tactic.
Yet the socialist state soon confronted another military threat when, in April
1920, it was attacked by Poland. Polish forces reached the neighborhood of Kiev
before they were defeated. When the Red Army, in a counterthrust, approached
Warsaw, the Western Allies intervened, demanding an end to the offensive and
peace. British Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon proposed a dividing line between
Poland and Russia which the Soviets were prepared to accept. Poland, however,
refused, so the final settlement was made along the prewar military lines, far to
the east of what Curzon had proposed.
Poland thus managed to sharpen the antagonism of its two historic enemies:
Germany, from which it had acquired Upper Silesia and the Polish corridor; and
the Soviet Union, from which it had seized the territory east of what became
known as the Curzon Line. When the smoke cleared, the Soviet Union found
itself free at last of wars and revolution, yet having paid for it with the loss of
most of the tsars’ conquests in the Baltic, Finland, Poland, Bessarabia, and along
the Turkish frontier. By 1923, Moscow had reclaimed control of Ukraine and
Georgia, which had seceded from the Russian Empire during the turmoil—an
event not forgotten by many contemporary Russian leaders.
To restore domestic control, the Soviet Union had to make a pragmatic
compromise between revolutionary crusades and Realpolitik, between the
proclamation of world revolution and the practice of peaceful coexistence.
Though it opted to defer world revolution, the Soviet Union was far from a
supporter of the existing order. It saw in peace an opportunity to pit the
capitalists against each other. Its particular target was Germany, which had
always played a major role in Soviet thought and in Russian sentiment. In
December 1920, Lenin described the Soviet strategy:
Our existence depends, first, on the existence of a radical split in the camp of the imperialist powers
and, secondly, on the fact that the victory of the Entente and the Versailles peace have thrown the
vast majority of the German nation into a position where they cannot live…. The German bourgeois
government madly hates the Bolsheviks, but the interests of the international situation are pushing it
towards peace with Soviet Russia against its own will.23
Germany was coming to the same conclusion. During the Russo-Polish war,
General Hans von Seeckt, the architect of the postwar German army, had
written:
The present Polish state is a creation of the Entente. It is to replace the pressure formerly exercised
by Russia on the eastern frontier of Germany. The fight of Soviet Russia with Poland hits not only
the latter, but above all the Entente—France and Britain. If Poland collapses the whole edifice of the
Versailles Treaty totters. From this it follows clearly that Germany has no interest in rendering any
help to Poland in her struggle with Russia.24
Von Seeckt’s view confirmed the fears aired by Lord Balfour a few years earlier
(and quoted in the last chapter)—that Poland gave Russia and Germany a
common enemy and obviated their balancing one another, as they had done
throughout the nineteenth century. In the Versailles system, Germany faced not a
Triple Entente but a multitude of states in various stages of disagreement with
each other, all of them opposed as well by a Soviet Union with territorial
grievances very similar to Germany’s. It was only a matter of time before the
two outcasts pooled their resentments.
The occasion arose in 1922 at Rapallo, an Italian seaside town near Genoa,
and the site of Lloyd George’s international conference. Ironically, it was made
possible by the constant haggling over reparations that had been going on since
the Treaty of Versailles, and that had intensified after the presentation of the
Allied reparations bill and Germany’s claim that it was unable to pay.
A major obstacle to the conference’s success was that Lloyd George had
neither the power nor the wisdom with which Secretary of State George
Marshall would later steer his own reconstruction program to fruition. At the last
moment, France refused to permit the subject of reparations to be included in the
agenda, fearing, quite correctly, that France would be pressed to reduce the total
amount. It seemed that France prized above all its unfulfillable, albeit
internationally recognized, claim to some attainable compromise. Germany was
looking for a moratorium on reparations. The Soviets were suspicious that the
Allies might try to end the impasse by linking tsarist debts to German
reparations, whereby the Soviet Union would be asked to acknowledge the tsars’
debts and to reimburse itself from German reparations. Article 116 of the Treaty
of Versailles had left open precisely this possibility.
The Soviet government had no more intention of acknowledging tsarist debts
than it did of recognizing British and French financial claims. Nor was it anxious
to add Germany to its already extensive list of adversaries by joining the
reparations merry-go-round. In order to prevent the Genoa Conference from
resolving this issue to the Soviets’ disadvantage, Moscow proposed in advance
of the conference that the two pariahs establish diplomatic relations and
mutually renounce all claims against each other. Not wanting to be the first
European country to establish diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and
thereby possibly jeopardize its chances of obtaining relief from the reparations
bill, Germany evaded the proposition. The proposal remained on the table until
events at Genoa forced a change of attitude.
Soviet Foreign Minister Georgi Chicherin, an aristocrat by birth who became
a passionate believer in the Bolshevik cause, relished the opportunity provided
by Genoa to put revolutionary convictions into the service of Realpolitik. He
proclaimed “peaceful coexistence” in terms which placed practical cooperation
above the requirements of ideology:
…the Russian delegation recognize that in the present period of history, which permits the parallel
existence of the old social order and of the new order now being born, economic collaboration
between the States representing these two systems of property is imperatively necessary for the
general economic reconstruction.25
At the same time, Chicherin coupled the appeal for cooperation with proposals
well designed to compound the confusion of the democracies. He spelled out an
agenda so sweeping that it could neither be implemented nor ignored by
democratic governments—a tactic that would remain a constant of Soviet
diplomacy. This agenda included the abolition of weapons of mass destruction, a
world economic conference, and international control of all waterways. The
purpose was to mobilize Western public opinion and to give Moscow a
reputation for peaceful internationalism which would make it difficult for the
democracies to organize the anticommunist crusade which was the Kremlin’s
nightmare.
Chicherin found himself an outsider at Genoa, though no more so than the
members of the German delegation. The Western Allies remained oblivious to
the temptations they were creating for both Germany and the Soviet Union by
pretending that these two most powerful countries on the Continent could simply
be ignored. Three requests by the German Chancellor and his Foreign Minister
for a meeting with Lloyd George were rebuffed. Simultaneously, France
proposed holding private consultations with Great Britain and the Soviet Union
from which Germany would be excluded. The purpose of these meetings was to
resurrect the shopworn scheme of trading tsarist debts for German reparations—
a proposal which even less suspicious diplomats than the Soviets would have
construed as a trap to undermine the prospect of improved German-Soviet
relations.
By the end of the first week of the conference, both Germany and the Soviet
Union were worried that they would be pitted against each other. When one of
Chicherin’s aides telephoned the German delegation at the conspiratorial hour of
one-fifteen in the morning on April 16, 1922, proposing a meeting later that day
at Rapallo, the Germans jumped at the invitation. They were anxious to end their
isolation as much as the Soviets wanted to avoid the dubious privilege of
becoming German creditors. The two foreign ministers lost little time drafting an
agreement in which Germany and the Soviet Union established full diplomatic
relations, renounced claims against each other, and granted each other Most
Favored Nation status. Lloyd George, upon receiving belated intelligence of the
meeting, frantically tried to reach the German delegation to invite them to the
interview he had repeatedly rejected. The message reached Rathenau, the
German negotiator, as he was about to leave for the signing of the SovietGerman agreement. He hesitated, then muttered: “Le vin est tiré; il faut le boire”
(The wine is drawn; it must be drunk).26
Within a year, Germany and the Soviet Union were negotiating secret
agreements for military and economic cooperation. Though Rapallo later came
to be a symbol of the dangers of Soviet-German rapprochement, it was in fact
one of those fateful accidents which seem inevitable only in retrospect:
accidental in the sense that neither side planned for it to happen when it did;
inevitable because the stage for it had been set by the Western Allies’ ostracism
of the two largest Continental countries, by their creation of a belt of weak states
between them hostile to each, and by their dismemberment of both Germany and
the Soviet Union. All of this created the maximum incentive for Germany and
the Soviet Union to overcome their ideological hostility and to cooperate in
undermining Versailles.
Rapallo by itself did not have that consequence; it symbolized, however, a
common overriding interest which continued to draw together Soviet and
German leaders for the remainder of the interwar period. George Kennan has
ascribed this agreement in part to Soviet persistence, in part to Western disunity
and complacency.27 Clearly, the Western democracies were shortsighted and
fatuous. But once they had made the error of drafting the Treaty of Versailles,
only extremely forbidding choices were left to them. In the long run, SovietGerman cooperation could have been forestalled only by a British and French
deal with one or the other of them. But the minimum price of such a deal with
Germany would have been the rectification of the Polish border and, almost
certainly, the abolition of the Polish Corridor. In such a Europe, France could
only have avoided German domination by a firm alliance with Great Britain,
which, of course, the British refused to consider. Similarly, the practical
implication of any deal with the Soviet Union would have been the restoration of
the Curzon Line, which Poland would have rejected and France would not
consider. The democracies were not prepared to pay either price, or even to
admit to the dilemma of how to defend the Versailles settlement without
allowing either Germany or the Soviet Union a significant role.
This being the case, there was always the possibility that the two Continental
giants might opt to partition Eastern Europe between themselves rather than join
a coalition directed against the other. Thus it remained to Hitler and Stalin,
unfettered by the past and driven by their lusts for power, to blow away the
house of cards assembled by the well-meaning, peace-loving, and essentially
timid statesmen of the interwar period.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Stresemann and the Re-emergence of the
Vanquished
All the principles of balance-of-power diplomacy as they had been practiced in
Europe since William III would have commanded that Great Britain and France
form an anti-German alliance to rein in the revisionist impulses of their restless
neighbor. Ultimately, Great Britain and France were each weaker than Germany
—even a defeated Germany—and could hope to counterbalance it only in
coalition. But that coalition was never formed. Great Britain abandoned the
single-minded pursuit of equilibrium that had distinguished its policy for three
centuries. It oscillated between a superficial application of the balance of power,
which it aimed at France, and a growing devotion to the new principle of
collective security, which it recoiled from enforcing. France pursued a foreign
policy of desperation, alternating between using the Treaty of Versailles to delay
German recovery and making halfhearted attempts to reconcile its ominous
neighbor. Thus it happened that the statesman destined to do the most to shape
the diplomatic landscape of the 1920s—Gustav Stresemann—came not from one
of the victorious powers, but from defeated Germany.
But before the emergence of Stresemann, there was to be one more doomed
effort by France to assure its security by its own efforts. At the end of 1922, with
reparations elusive, disarmament controversial, meaningful British security
guarantees unavailable, and German-Soviet rapprochement taking place, France
found itself at the end of its emotional tether. Raymond Poincaré, its wartime
President, took over as Prime Minister and decided in favor of unilateral
enforcement of the Versailles reparations clause. In January 1923, French and
Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland, without
consulting the other Allies.
Lloyd George would remark many years later: “If there had been no Rapallo,
there would have been no Ruhr.”1 But it is also true that, had Great Britain been
prepared to undertake a security guarantee, France would not have embarked on
so desperate a step as occupying Germany’s industrial heartland. And if France
had been more ready to compromise on reparations (and on the disarmament
issue), Great Britain might have been more forthcoming about forging an
alliance—though how meaningful this alliance would have been, given the nearpacifist state of British public opinion, is another matter.
Ironically, France’s sole unilateral military initiative demonstrated that it had
in fact lost the capacity to act alone. France took control of the industries of the
Ruhr region in order to exploit its steel and coal as a substitute for the
reparations payments refused by the Germans. The German government ordered
passive resistance and paid the coal and steel workers not to work. Though the
policy bankrupted the German government—and sparked hyperinflation—it also
prevented France from achieving its objective, thereby turning the occupation of
the Ruhr into a massive French failure.
France was now thoroughly isolated. The United States expressed its
displeasure by withdrawing its own army of occupation from the Rhineland.
Great Britain glowered. Germany saw in this split between the Allies an
opportunity for rapprochement with Great Britain. The heady atmosphere of
national resistance to the French occupation even led some German leaders to
resurrect the old project of an Anglo-German alliance—another instance of
Germany’s ingrained tendency to overestimate its options. The British
Ambassador to Berlin, Lord d’Abernon, reported a conversation in which a
leading German statesman resurrected some of the arguments of imperial
Germany for a British alliance, declaring that “the position of 1914 is today
reversed. It is quite clear that, as in 1914 England had fought Germany to
withstand a military domination of Europe, so in the course of a few years she
might fight France on the same grounds. The question is whether England would
carry on that fight alone or whether she would have allies.”2
No responsible British leader thought of going so far as allying his country
with Germany. Nevertheless, on August 11, 1923, Foreign Secretary Curzon and
Foreign Office official Sir Eyre Crowe (author of the Crowe Memorandum of
1907) demanded that France reconsider its course in the Ruhr at the risk of
losing Great Britain’s support in a future crisis with Germany. Poincaré was not
impressed. He did not consider British support a favor to France but, rather, a
requirement of the British national interest: “…in case a situation like in 1914
develops… England, in its own interest, will have to take the same measure as
she took back then.”3
Poincaré turned out to be right about what Great Britain’s ultimate choice
would be when faced with a situation similar to that of 1914. But he
miscalculated as to the amount of time it would take Great Britain to realize it
was indeed facing a similar crisis and that, in the interim, the rickety Versailles
system would be in a shambles.
The occupation of the Ruhr ended in the fall of 1923. France did not succeed
in generating a significant separatist movement in the Ruhr or even in the
Rhineland, which, according to the terms of the Versailles Treaty, the German
army was not permitted to enter and therefore could not go into to quell a
separatist movement. The coal mined during the occupation barely paid for the
costs of administering the territory. In the meantime, Germany was beset by
insurrections developing in Saxony (from the political left) and in Bavaria (from
the right). Inflation raged, threatening the ability of the German government to
carry out any of its obligations. France’s insistence on full reparations had
become unfulfillable as a result of French actions.
France and Great Britain had managed to checkmate each other: France, by
insisting on weakening Germany by unilateral action and thereby forfeiting
British support; Great Britain, by insisting on conciliation without considering
its impact on the balance of power, thereby forfeiting French security. Even a
disarmed Germany proved strong enough to thwart unilateral French actions—
an augury of what lay ahead once Germany threw off the shackles of Versailles.
In the 1920s, whenever the democracies came to a dead end, they would
invoke the League of Nations rather than face geopolitical realities. Even the
British general staff fell into this trap. The very memorandum quoted in the
previous chapter that had identified Germany as the principal threat and deemed
France incapable of offering effective resistance, fell in with the prevailing
orthodoxies: in its conclusions, the general staff had no better idea than
“strengthening” the League (whatever that meant) and making “alliances ad hoc
in such situations as… Germany running amok.”4
That recommendation was a nearly guaranteed prescription for failure. The
League was too divided and, by the time Germany ran amok, it would be too late
to organize alliances. Now, all Germany needed to ensure for itself an even more
commanding long-term position than it had enjoyed before the war was a
statesman sufficiently farsighted and patient to erode the discriminatory
provisions of the Treaty of Versailles.
Such a leader emerged in 1923, when Gustav Stresemann became Foreign
Minister and then Chancellor. His method for renewing Germany’s strength was
the socalled policy of “fulfillment,” which amounted to a total reversal of
previous German policy and the abandonment of the diplomatic guerrilla war his
predecessors had waged against the provisions of the Versailles Treaty.
“Fulfillment” relied on taking advantage of the obvious discomfort of Great
Britain and France with the distance between their principles and the terms of
Versailles. In return for a German effort to meet an eased reparations schedule,
Stresemann strove to be released from the most onerous political and military
provisions of Versailles by the Allies themselves.
A nation defeated in war and partially occupied by foreign troops has basically
two choices. It can challenge the victor in the hope of making enforcement of the
peace too painful; or it can cooperate with the victor while regaining strength for
a later confrontation. Both strategies contain risks. After a military defeat,
resistance invites a test of strength at the moment of maximum weakness;
collaboration risks demoralization, because policies which appeal to the victor
also tend to confuse the public opinion of the vanquished.
Before Stresemann, Germany had pursued the policy of resistance.
Confrontational tactics had enabled it to prevail in the Ruhr crisis, but
Germany’s grievances were hardly allayed by the French withdrawal from the
Ruhr. Strangely enough, the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France was not
controversial. But the redrawing of Germany’s borders, giving Poland large
tracts of German territory, faced passionate nationalistic opposition. Finally,
there were widespread pressures to throw off the restrictions on German military
strength. And there was nearly unanimous consensus in Germany that the Allied
reparations demands were outrageous.
Unlike the nationalists, Stresemann understood that no matter how unpopular
the Versailles Treaty—indeed, regardless of how much he hated it himself—he
needed British and, to some extent, French help to throw off its most onerous
provisions. The Rapallo understanding had been a useful tactic to unnerve the
Western democracies. But because the Soviet Union was too impoverished to aid
German economic recovery and too isolated to lend support in most diplomatic
confrontations, its real impact would be felt only after Germany became strong
enough to challenge the Versailles settlement openly. Above all, regaining
economic strength required foreign loans, something Germany would find
difficult in an atmosphere of confrontation. Thus, Stresemann’s policy of
fulfillment reflected above all his realistic assessment of the requirements of
German political and economic recovery: “Germany’s basic military weakness,”
he wrote, “spells out the limits, the nature, and the methods of Germany’s
foreign policy.”5
Though the fulfillment policy was grounded in realism, that commodity was
in no more abundant supply in postwar Germany (especially in conservative
circles) than it had been in the days when the conservatives’ policies had so
heavily contributed to the outbreak of World War I. Ending the war while
German forces still stood on Allied soil had enabled those responsible for
Germany’s participation in the war to escape the consequences of their folly, and
to saddle their more moderate successors with the blame. Lloyd George had
foreseen this result when, on October 26, 1918, he commented to the War
Cabinet about Germany’s first peace overtures:
The Prime Minister said that industrial France had been devastated and Germany had escaped. At the
first moment when we were in a position to put the lash on Germany’s back she said “I give up.” The
question arose whether we ought not to continue lashing her as she had lashed France.6
His colleagues, however, thought Great Britain too exhausted to pursue such a
course. Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain replied wearily that “vengeance
was too expensive these days.”7
As Lloyd George had predicted, the new Weimar Republic was from the
outset besieged by nationalist agitators, even though it had been granted peace
terms far more generous than what the military high command could have
obtained. Germany’s new democratic leaders received no credit for preserving
their country’s substance under the most difficult of circumstances. In politics,
however, there are few rewards for mitigating damage because it is rarely
possible to prove that worse consequences would in fact have occurred.
Just as, two generations later, it took a conservative American president to
engineer America’s opening to China, only a leader with the impeccable
conservative credentials of Stresemann could have even thought of basing
German foreign policy on cooperating, however ambivalently, with the hated
Versailles settlement. The son of a beer distributor, Stresemann was born in
Berlin in 1878 and had built his political career by espousing the views of the
conservative, pro-business bourgeois National Liberal Party. He became its
leader in 1917. A man of great conviviality, he loved literature and history, and
his conversations were frequently sprinkled with allusions to German classics.
Nevertheless, his early views on foreign policy reflected the conventional
conservative wisdom. For example, he was convinced that Germany had been
lured into the war by a jealous Great Britain eager to preserve its own primacy.
As late as 1917, Stresemann had advocated vast conquests in both the East
and the West, as well as the annexation of French and British colonial
possessions in Asia and Africa. He had also supported unrestricted submarine
warfare, the calamitous decision which brought America into the war. That the
man who had called the Treaty of Versailles “the greatest swindle in history”8
should initiate a policy of fulfillment seems a strange turn of events only to those
who believe that Realpolitik cannot teach the benefits of moderation.
Stresemann was the first postwar German leader—and the only democratic
leader—who exploited the geopolitical advantages which the Versailles
settlement conferred on Germany. He grasped the essentially brittle nature of the
Franco-English relationship, and used it to widen the wedge between the two
wartime allies. He cleverly exploited the British fear of a German collapse vis-àvis both France and the Soviet Union. An official British analyst described
Germany as a crucial bulwark against the spread of Bolshevism, using
arguments which would show that “fulfillment” was making progress. The
German government was “supported by [a] majority of National Assembly, is
genuinely democratic, intends to carry out [the] Treaty of Peace to [the] best of
its ability, and is deserving [of] frank support from Allies.” If British support
failed, Germany “will inevitably gravitate toward Bolshevism now and
ultimately perhaps to absolute monarchism again.”9
Great Britain’s arguments in favor of assistance to Germany bear a certain
resemblance to American propositions regarding aid to Russia in the Yeltsin
period. In neither case was there an assessment of the consequences of the
“success” of the policy being advocated. If fulfillment succeeded, Germany
would become progressively stronger and be in a position to threaten the
equilibrium of Europe. Similarly, if a post–Cold War international aid program
to Russia achieves its objective, growing Russian strength will produce
geopolitical consequences all around the vast periphery of the former Russian
Empire.
In both cases, the advocates of conciliation had positive, even farsighted,
goals. The Western democracies were wise to go along with Stresemann’s
fulfillment policy. But they erred in not tightening the bonds among themselves.
The policy of fulfillment was bound to bring closer the day described by General
von Seeckt: “We must regain our power, and as soon as we do, we will naturally
take back everything we lost.”10 America was farsighted in offering aid to post–
Cold War Russia; but once Russia recovers economically, its pressure on
neighboring countries is certain to mount. This may be a price worth paying, but
it would be a mistake not to recognize that there is a price.
In the early stages of his fulfillment policy, Stresemann’s ultimate aims were
irrelevant. Whether he was seeking permanent conciliation or an overthrow of
the existing order—or, as was most likely, keeping both options open—he first
had to free Germany from the controversy over reparations. With the exception
of France, the Allies were equally eager to put the issue behind them and to
begin receiving some reparations at last. As for France, it hoped to escape from
the self-inflicted trap of having occupied the Ruhr.
Stresemann skillfully proposed international arbitration for a new schedule of
reparations, expecting an international forum to prove less exacting than France
alone was likely to be. In November 1923, France accepted the appointment of
an American banker, Charles G. Dawes, as “impartial arbiter” to reduce France’s
reparation claim—a galling symbol of the disintegration of the wartime alliance.
The Dawes Committee’s recommendations establishing a reduced schedule of
payments for five years were accepted in April 1924.
Over the next five years, Germany paid out about $1 billion in reparations and
received loans of about $2 billion, much of it from the United States. In effect,
America was paying Germany’s reparations, while Germany used the surplus
from American loans to modernize its industry. France had insisted on
reparations in order to keep Germany weak. Forced to choose between a weak
Germany and a Germany capable of paying reparations, France had opted for the
latter, but then had to stand by as reparations helped to rebuild Germany’s
economic and, ultimately, its military power.
By the end of 1923, Stresemann was in a position to claim some success:
All our measures of a political and diplomatic nature, through deliberate cooperation by the two
Anglo-Saxon Powers, the estrangement of Italy from her neighbour [France], and the vacillation of
Belgium, have combined to create a situation for France that the country will not in the long run be
able to sustain.11
Stresemann’s assessment was accurate. The fulfillment policy produced an
insoluble quandary for both France and the entire European order. French
security required a certain amount of discrimination against Germany in the
military field; otherwise, Germany’s superior potential in manpower and
resources would prevail. But without equality—the right to build armaments like
any other European country—Germany would never accept the Versailles
system, and fulfillment would come to a halt.
Fulfillment placed British diplomats in a difficult position as well. If Great
Britain did not grant Germany military equality as a quid pro quo for Germany’s
meeting its reparations payments, Germany could well revert to its earlier
intransigence. But military equality for Germany would imperil France. Great
Britain might have made an alliance with France to counterbalance Germany, but
it did not wish to become entangled in France’s alliances in Eastern Europe or to
find itself at war with Germany over some piece of Polish or Czech territory.
“For the Polish Corridor,” said Austen Chamberlain in 1925, paraphrasing
Bismarck’s remark about the Balkans, “no British government ever will or ever
can risk the bones of a British grenadier.”12 His prediction, like Bismarck’s, was
disproved by events: Great Britain did go to war—just as Germany had earlier in
the century—and for the very cause it had so consistently disdained.
To avoid this dilemma, Austen Chamberlain in 1925 developed an idea for a
limited alliance among Great Britain, France, and Belgium which would
guarantee only their borders with Germany—in essence a military alliance to
resist German aggression in the West. By this time, however, Stresemann’s
fulfillment policy had made such headway that he held a near-veto over Allied
initiatives. To forestall Germany’s being identified as the potential aggressor, he
declared that a pact without Germany was a pact against Germany.
Half-convinced that Germany’s fear of encirclement had contributed to its
bellicose prewar policy, Chamberlain retreated to a curious hybrid agreement in
which he sought to blend a traditional alliance with the new principle of
collective security. In keeping with the alliance concept originally proposed, the
new pact—signed at Locarno, Switzerland—guaranteed the borders between
France, Belgium, and Germany against aggression. True to the principle of
collective security, the draft presumed neither aggressor nor victim but promised
resistance against aggression from whatever quarter in either direction. The
casus belli was no longer an aggressive act by a specific country but the
violation of a legal norm by any country.
By the mid-1920s, Stresemann, the Minister of defeated Germany, was in the
driver’s seat much more than Briand and Chamberlain, the representatives of the
victors. In return for renouncing revisionism in the West, Stresemann drew from
Briand and Chamberlain an implicit recognition that the Versailles Treaty
required revision in the East. Germany accepted its Western frontier with France
and Belgium, and the permanent demilitarization of the Rhineland; Great Britain
and Italy guaranteed this arrangement, pledging assistance to repel invasions
across the frontiers or into the demilitarized Rhineland from whatever direction.
At the same time, Stresemann refused to accept Germany’s border with Poland,
which the other signatories also refused to guarantee. Germany concluded
arbitration agreements with its Eastern neighbors, pledging peaceful settlement
of all disputes. Yet Great Britain refused to extend its guarantee even to that
pledge. Finally, Germany agreed to enter the League of Nations, thereby
assuming a general obligation to settle all disputes by peaceful means, which, in
theory, included the unrecognized borders in the East.
The Locarno Pact was greeted with exuberant relief as the dawning of a new
world order. The three foreign ministers—Aristide Briand of France, Austen
Chamberlain of Great Britain, and Gustav Stresemann of Germany—received
the Nobel Peace Prize. But amidst all the jubilation, no one noticed that the
statesmen had sidestepped the real issues; Locarno had not so much pacified
Europe as it had defined the next battlefield.
The reassurance felt by the democracies at Germany’s formal recognition of
its Western frontier showed the extent of the demoralization and the confusion
that had been caused by the mélange of old and new views on international
affairs. For in that recognition was implicit that the Treaty of Versailles, which
had ended a victorious war, had been unable to command compliance with the
victors’ peace terms, and that Germany had acquired the option of observing
only those provisions which it chose to reaffirm. In this sense, Stresemann’s
unwillingness to recognize Germany’s Eastern frontiers was ominous; while
Great Britain’s refusal to guarantee even the arbitration treaties gave
international sanction to two classes of frontier in Europe—those accepted by
Germany and guaranteed by the other powers, and those neither accepted by
Germany nor guaranteed by the other powers.
To confuse matters further, three tiers of commitments now prevailed in
Europe. The first consisted of traditional alliances backed by the conventional
machinery of staff talks and political consultations. No longer in vogue, these
were confined to French arrangements with the weak new states in Eastern
Europe—alliances which Great Britain refused to join. In the event of German
aggression in Eastern Europe, France would face a choice between undesirable
alternatives: abandoning Poland and Czechoslovakia, or fighting alone, which
had been its recurring nightmare since 1870 and was not something it was very
likely to undertake. The second tier consisted of special guarantees such as
Locarno, obviously deemed less binding than formal alliances, which explains
why they never encountered obstacles in the House of Commons. Finally, there
was the League of Nations’ own commitment to collective security, which was in
practice devalued by Locarno. For, if collective security was in fact reliable,
Locarno was unnecessary; and if Locarno was necessary, the League of Nations
was, by definition, inadequate to assure the security of even its principal
founding members.
Because neither the Locarno-type guarantee nor the general concept of
collective security identified a potential aggressor, both rendered advance
military planning impossible. Even if concerted military action had been
possible—and there is no example of it during the League period—the
bureaucratic machinery guaranteed endless delays for fact-finding and various
other League conciliation procedures.
All of these unprecedented diplomatic stipulations compounded the
uneasiness of the countries which considered themselves most threatened. Italy
ended up guaranteeing frontiers along the Rhine, which it had never in its history
identified with national security. Italy’s primary interest in Locarno had been to
gain recognition as a Great Power. Having achieved that goal, it saw no reason to
run any actual risks—as it would amply demonstrate when the Rhine frontier
was challenged ten years later. For Great Britain, Locarno signified the first
agreement in which a major power simultaneously guaranteed an erstwhile ally
and a recently defeated enemy while pretending to be impartial between them.
Locarno represented not so much reconciliation between France and Germany
as endorsement of the military outcome of the recent war. Germany had been
defeated in the West but had overcome Russia in the East. Locarno in effect
confirmed both results and laid the basis for Germany’s ultimate assault on the
Eastern settlement.
Locarno, hailed in 1925 as turning the corner toward permanent peace, in fact
marked the beginning of the end of the Versailles international order. From then
on, the distinction between victor and vanquished became more and more murky
—a situation which could have been beneficial had the victor gained from it a
heightened sense of security or the defeated become reconciled to living with a
modified settlement. Neither occurred. France’s frustration and sense of
impotence grew with every passing year. So did nationalist agitation in Germany.
The wartime Allies had all abdicated their responsibilities—America shirked its
role in designing the peace, Great Britain renounced its historic role as balancer,
and France relinquished its responsibility as guardian of the Versailles
settlement. Only Stresemann, leader of a defeated Germany, had a long-range
policy, and he inexorably moved his country to the center of the international
stage.
The sole remaining hope for a peaceful new world order was that the
emotional lift of the agreement itself and the expectations it produced, as
summed up in the slogan “the spirit of Locarno,” might overcome its structural
failings. Contrary to Wilson’s teachings, it was not the broad masses which
promoted this new atmosphere but the foreign ministers—Chamberlain, Briand,
and Stresemann—of the countries whose suspicions and rivalries had produced
the war and prevented the consolidation of the peace.
Since there was no geopolitical basis for the Versailles order, the statesmen
were driven to invoking their personal relationships as a means of maintaining it
—a step none of their predecessors had ever taken. The aristocrats who had
conducted foreign policy in the nineteenth century belonged to a world in which
intangibles were understood in the same way. Most of them were comfortable
with each other. Nevertheless, they did not believe that their personal relations
could influence their assessments of their countries’ national interests.
Agreements were never justified by the “atmosphere” they generated, and
concessions were never made to sustain individual leaders in office. Nor did
leaders address each other by their first names as a way of underlining their good
relations with each other for the sake of their publics’ opinions.
That style of diplomacy changed after World War I. Since then, the trend
toward personalizing relations has accelerated. When Briand welcomed
Germany to the League, he stressed Stresemann’s human qualities, and
Stresemann responded in kind. Similarly, Austen Chamberlain’s alleged personal
predilection for France caused Stresemann to accelerate his policy of fulfillment
and to recognize Germany’s Western border when Chamberlain replaced the
more pro-German Lord Curzon as foreign secretary in 1924.
Austen Chamberlain was the scion of a distinguished family. The son of the
brilliant and mercurial Joseph Chamberlain, advocate of an alliance with
Germany early in the century, he was the half-brother of Neville Chamberlain,
who was to make the Munich settlement. Like his father, Austen wielded
massive power in Great Britain’s coalition governments. But, also like his father,
he never reached the highest office; indeed, he was the only leader of the
Conservative Party in the twentieth century who did not become prime minister.
As one quip had it, Austen “always played the game, and always lost it.” Harold
Macmillan said of Austen Chamberlain: “He spoke well, but never in the grand
style. He was clear, but not incisive…. He was respected, but never feared.”13
Chamberlain’s major diplomatic accomplishment was his role in forging the
Locarno Pact. Because Chamberlain was known to be a Francophile, having
once remarked that he “loved France like a woman,” Stresemann feared an
incipient Franco-English alliance. It was this fear that moved Stresemann to
originate the process that led to Locarno.
In retrospect, the weakness of the policy of creating two classes of frontiers in
Europe has become obvious. But Chamberlain viewed it as a crucial extension of
Great Britain’s strategic commitments, which went to the limit of what the
British public would support. Until the beginning of the eighteenth century,
Great Britain’s security frontier had been at the Channel. Throughout the
nineteenth century, the security frontier had been at the borders of the Low
Countries. Austen Chamberlain tried to extend it to the Rhine, where, in the end,
it was not supported when Germany challenged it in 1936. A guarantee to Poland
was beyond the ken of British statesmen in 1925.
Aristide Briand was a classic political leader of the Third Republic. Starting
his career as a left-wing firebrand, he became a fixture in French Cabinets—
occasionally as prime minister but more frequently as foreign minister (he
served in fourteen governments in that capacity). He recognized early on that
France’s relative position vis-à-vis Germany was declining and concluded that
reconciliation with Germany represented France’s best hope for long-term
security. Relying on his convivial personality, he hoped to relieve Germany of
the most onerous provisions of the Treaty of Versailles.
Briand’s policy could not be popular in a country devastated by German
armies. Nor is it at all easy to determine to what extent Briand’s was an attempt
to end a century-old enmity or whether it represented a reluctant Realpolitik. In
times of crisis, Frenchmen preferred the tough and austere Poincaré, who
insisted on rigid enforcement of Versailles. When crises became too painful to
sustain—as after the occupation of the Ruhr—Briand would re-emerge. The
trouble with this constant alternation was that France lost the capacity to pursue
the policies of either of these two antipodal figures to their logical conclusions:
France was no longer strong enough to carry out Poincaré’s policy, yet French
public opinion gave Briand too little to offer to Germany to achieve permanent
reconciliation.
Whatever his ultimate motives, Briand understood that, if France did not
pursue conciliation, it would be extorted from it by Anglo-Saxon pressure and
by Germany’s growing strength. Stresemann, though an ardent opponent of the
Treaty of Versailles, believed that a relaxation of tensions with France would
speed revision of the disarmament clauses and lay the basis for a revision of
Germany’s eastern borders.
On September 27, 1926, Briand and Stresemann met in the quaint village of
Thoiry, in the French Jura Mountains near Geneva. Germany had just been
admitted to the League of Nations and welcomed by a warm, eloquent, and
personal speech from Briand. In this heady atmosphere, the two statesmen
worked out a package deal designed to settle the war once and for all. France
would return the Saar without the plebiscite called for by the Treaty of
Versailles. French troops would evacuate the Rhineland within a year, and the
InterAllied Military Control Commission (IMCC) would be withdrawn from
Germany. In return, Germany would pay 300 million Marks for the Saar mines,
speed up reparations payments to France, and fulfill the Dawes Plan. Briand was
in effect offering to trade the most invidious provisions of Versailles for help
with French economic recovery. The agreement demonstrated the unequal
bargaining position of the two sides. Germany’s gains were permanent and
irrevocable; France’s benefits were onetime, transitory, financial contributions,
some of which repeated what Germany had previously promised.
The agreement ran into problems in both capitals. German nationalists
violently opposed any form of cooperation with Versailles, however
advantageous the specific terms, and Briand was accused of throwing away the
Rhineland buffer. There were further difficulties with the bond issue for
financing additional German expenditures. On November 11, Briand abruptly
broke off the talks, declaring that “the prompt fulfillment of the Thoiry idea had
been crushed by technical obstacles.”14
This was the last attempt at a general settlement between France and Germany
in the interwar period. Nor is it clear whether it would have made all that much
difference had it been implemented. For the basic question posed by Locarno
diplomacy remained—whether conciliation would cause Germany to accept the
Versailles international order or accelerate Germany’s capacity to threaten it.
After Locarno, that question became increasingly moot. Great Britain was
convinced that conciliation was the only practical course. America believed it
was a moral imperative as well. Strategic or geopolitical analysis having become
unfashionable, the nations talked about justice even while they strenuously
disagreed about its definition. A spate of treaties affirming general principles and
appeals to the League followed—partly from conviction, partly from exhaustion,
and partly from the desire to avoid painful geopolitical realities.
The post-Locarno period witnessed France’s step-by-step retreat from the
Versailles settlement—against its better judgment—under constant British (and
American) pressures to go even further. After Locarno, capital—mostly
American—poured into Germany, accelerating the modernization of its industry.
The InterAllied Military Control Commission, which had been created to
supervise German disarmament, was abolished in 1927, and its functions were
turned over to the League of Nations, which had no means of verifying
compliance.
Germany’s secret rearmament accelerated. As early as 1920, the then minister
of industry, Walther Rathenau, had consoled the German military with the
argument that the provisions of Versailles leading to the dismantling of heavy
German armaments would affect primarily weapons which would in any event
soon become obsolete. And nothing, he argued, could prevent research on
modern weapons or the creation of the industrial capacity to build them quickly.
Attending army maneuvers in 1926, shortly after Locarno was ratified and at the
moment that Briand and Stresemann were meeting at Thoiry, Field Marshal von
Hindenburg, the Commander of the German army for the last three years of the
war and the recently elected President of Germany, said: “I have seen today that
the German army’s traditional standard of spirit and skill has been preserved.”15
If that was so, France’s security would be in jeopardy as soon as the restrictions
on the size of the German army were lifted.
As the disarmament issue moved to the forefront of international diplomacy,
this threat loomed ever closer. Demanding political equality, Germany was
carefully creating the psychological framework for insisting on military parity
later. France refused to disarm unless it obtained additional security guarantees;
Great Britain, the only country in a position to extend them, refused to guarantee
the Eastern settlement and would go no further than Locarno with respect to the
Western settlement, thereby underlining the fact that Locarno was less of a
commitment than an alliance.
To avoid, or at least to delay, the day of formal German equality, France began
to play the game of developing criteria for the reduction of arms as favored by
League of Nations disarmament experts. It submitted an analytical paper to the
League Preparatory Commission relating actual power to potential power,
trained reserves to demographic trends, and weapons-in-being to the rate of
technological change. But none of the finely spun theories could get around the
key issue, which was that, at equal levels of armaments, however low, French
security was in jeopardy because of Germany’s superior mobilization potential.
The more France seemed to accept the premises of the Preparatory Commission,
the more pressure it generated against itself. In the end, all the various French
maneuvers served primarily to magnify the Anglo-Saxons’ conviction that
France was the real obstacle to disarmament and therefore to peace.
The poignancy of the French dilemma was that, after Locarno, France was no
longer in a position to pursue its convictions and had to settle for mitigating its
fears. French policy grew increasingly reactive and defensive. Symbolic of this
state of mind was that France began to construct the Maginot Line within two
years of Locarno—at a time when Germany was still disarmed and the
independence of the new states of Eastern Europe depended on France’s ability
to come to their aid. In the event of German aggression, Eastern Europe could
only be saved if France adopted an offensive strategy centered on its using the
demilitarized Rhineland as a hostage. Yet the Maginot Line indicated that France
intended to stay on the defensive inside its own borders, thereby liberating
Germany to work its will in the East. French political and military strategies
were no longer in step.
Confused leaders have a tendency to substitute public relations maneuvers for
a sense of direction. Driven by the desire to be perceived as doing something,
Briand used the occasion of the tenth anniversary of America’s entry into the
war to submit in June 1927 a draft treaty to Washington according to which the
two governments would renounce war in their relations with each other and
agree to settle all their disputes by peaceful means. The American Secretary of
State, Frank B. Kellogg, did not quite know how to respond to a document
which renounced what no one feared and offered what everyone took for
granted. The approach of the election year of 1928 helped to clear Kellogg’s
mind; “peace” was popular, and Briand’s draft had the advantage of hot
involving any practical consequence.
In early 1928, Secretary Kellogg ended his silence and accepted the draft
treaty. But he went Briand one better, proposing that the renunciation of war
include as many other nations as possible. The offer proved as irresistible as it
was meaningless. On August 27, 1928, the Pact of Paris (popularly known as the
Kellogg-Briand Pact), renouncing war as an instrument of national policy, was
signed with great fanfare by fifteen nations. It was quickly ratified by practically
all the countries of the world, including Germany, Japan, and Italy, the nations
whose aggressions would blight the next decade.
No sooner was the Pact signed than second thoughts began to seize the
world’s statesmen. France qualified its original proposal by inserting a clause
legalizing wars of self-defense and wars to honor obligations arising out of the
League Covenant, the Locarno guarantees, and all of France’s alliances. This
brought matters back to their starting point, for the exceptions encompassed
every conceivable practical case. Next, Great Britain insisted on freedom of
action in order to defend its empire. America’s reservations were the most
sweeping of all; it invoked the Monroe Doctrine, the right of self-defense, and
the stipulation that each nation be its own judge of the requirements of selfdefense. Retaining every possible loophole, the United States rejected
participation in any enforcement action as well.
In testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a few months
later, Kellogg presented the extraordinary theory that the United States had no
obligation under the Pact to help victims of aggression, since such aggression
would already have proved that the Pact had been abrogated. “Supposing some
other nation does break this treaty; why should we interest ourselves in it?”
asked Senator Walsh from Montana. “There is not a bit of reason,” replied the
Secretary of State.16
Kellogg had reduced the treaty to the tautology that the Pact of Paris would
preserve the peace as long as the peace was being preserved. War was banned in
all circumstances except those which were foreseeable. No wonder that D. W.
Brogan had this to say about the Kellogg-Briand Pact: “The United States, which
had abolished the evils of drink by the Eighteenth Amendment, invited the world
to abolish war by taking the pledge. The world, not quite daring to believe or
doubt, obeyed.”17
In the event, Briand’s original idea was transformed by his erstwhile allies
into a new means, of putting pressure on France. Henceforth it was widely
argued that, with war outlawed, France had an obligation to accelerate its own
disarmament. To symbolize the era of goodwill, the Allies ended the occupation
of the Rhineland in 1928, five years ahead of schedule.
Concurrently, Austen Chamberlain let it be known that, as far as Great Britain
was concerned, the Polish border with Germany could, and indeed should, be
modified, if only the Germans were civilized about it:
If she [Germany] comes into the League and plays her part there in a friendly and conciliatory spirit I
myself believe that within a reasonable number of years she will find herself in a position where her
economic and commercial support is so necessary and her political friendship so desirable to Poland
that, without having recourse to the League machinery, she will be able to make a friendly
arrangement on her own account directly with the Poles…. If the German public and press could be
restrained from talking so much about the eastern frontiers, they might get more quickly to a
solution.18
Stresemann skillfully used Germany’s entry into the League both to increase his
options toward the Soviet Union and to intensify German pressure on France for
parity in armaments. For example, Stresemann asked for and was granted an
exemption permitting German participation in the enforcement provisions of the
League Charter (Article 16) on the ground that a disarmed Germany was in no
position to face the risks of sanctions. Next, in Bismarckian fashion, Stresemann
notified Moscow that his request for the exemption had been due to Germany’s
reluctance to join any anti-Soviet coalition.
Moscow took the hint. Within a year of Locarno, in April 1926, a treaty of
neutrality between the Soviet Union and Germany was signed in Berlin. Each
party agreed to remain neutral if the other was attacked; each agreed not to join
any political combination or economic boycott aimed at the other—presumably
regardless of the issue. In effect, this meant that the two countries excluded
themselves from the application of collective security against each other. And
Germany had already exempted itself from sanctions against anyone else. Berlin
and Moscow were united in hostility to Poland, as German Chancellor Wirth told
his Ambassador to Moscow, Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau: “One thing I tell
you frankly; Poland must be eliminated…. I do not conclude any treaty which
might strengthen Poland.”19
Nevertheless, French leaders, especially Briand, concluded that the fulfillment
policy remained France’s only realistic option. If France’s worst fears came to
pass and Germany resumed a bellicose policy, the hope of eventually gaining
British support and maintaining America’s goodwill would surely be jeopardized
if France could be blamed for having wrecked conciliation.
Gradually, Europe’s center of gravity shifted to Berlin. Amazingly, at least in
retrospect, Stresemann’s domestic position was disintegrating all this time. The
prevailing nationalist attitude could be seen in the reaction to the socalled Young
Plan, which the Allies had proposed when the five-year term for the Dawes Plan
ran out in 1929. The Young Plan reduced German reparations even further and
established a terminal, albeit distant, date for them. In 1924, the Dawes Plan had
been adopted with the support of German conservatives; in 1929, the Young
Plan, which offered considerably better terms, came under violent attack from
German conservatives who were backed by the surging Nazi Party and by the
communists. It was finally approved in the Reichstag by just twenty votes.
For a few years, the purported spirit of Locarno had signified the aspiration
toward goodwill among the former adversaries of the First World War. But in
German, the word “spirit” is also a synonym for “ghost,” and by the end of the
decade it was becoming fashionable in nationalistic circles to joke about the
“ghost” of Locarno. This cynical attitude toward the centerpiece of the Versailles
international order existed even in the halcyon days of German economic
recovery, before the Depression had radicalized German politics beyond repair.
Stresemann died on October 3, 1929. He proved irreplaceable because
Germany had no other leader of comparable talent or subtlety and, above all,
because the rehabilitation of Germany and the pacification of Europe had in such
large part been due to the confidence the Western powers had placed in his
personality. For quite a long time, the prevailing view was that Stresemann had
embodied all the qualities of the “good European.” In this sense, he was treated
as a precursor of the great Konrad Adenauer, who recognized that France and
Germany in fact shared a common destiny across the gulf of their historic
rivalries.
Yet, when Stresemann’s papers became available, they seemed to contradict
the benign estimation of him. They revealed a calculating practitioner of
Realpolitik who pursued the traditional German national interest with ruthless
persistence. For Stresemann, these interests were straightforward: to restore
Germany to its pre-1914 stature, to dispose of the financial burdens of
reparations, to attain military parity with France and Great Britain, to revise
Germany’s Eastern border, and to achieve the union (Anschluss) of Austria and
Germany. Edgar Stern-Rubarth, a Stresemann aide, described his chief’s
objectives as follows:
Stresemann’s ultimate hope, as he once confessed to me, was: To free the Rhineland, to recover
Eupen-Malmédy, and the Saar, to perfect Austria’s Anschluss, and to have, under mandate or
otherwise an African colony where essential tropical raw materials could be secured and an outlet
created for the surplus energy of the younger generation.20
Stresemann was therefore clearly not a “good European” in the post-World War
II sense of the phrase, a criterion which did not yet exist, however. Most Western
statesmen shared Stresemann’s view that Versailles required revision, especially
in the East, and that Locarno was but a stage in this process. For France, of
course, it was unbearably painful to have to deal with a resurgent Germany after
a war in which it had expended its very substance. Yet this was also an accurate
reflection of the new distribution of power. Stresemann understood that, even
within the limits of Versailles, Germany was potentially the strongest nation in
Europe. He drew from this assessment the Realpolitik conclusion that he had
before him an opportunity to rebuild Germany to at least its pre-1914 level and
probably beyond.
Unlike his nationalist critics, however—and quite contrary to the Nazis—
Stresemann relied on patience, compromise, and the blessing of European
consensus to achieve his goals. Mental agility allowed him to trade paper
concessions—especially on the sensitive and symbolic issue of reparations—for
an end to the military occupation of Germany and for the prospect of long-term
changes which could not fail to place his country in an increasingly pivotal
position. Unlike the German nationalists, however, he saw no need for a violent
revision of Versailles.
Stresemann’s opportunity to pursue his policy was inherent in Germany’s
resources and potential. The war had not crippled Germany’s power, and
Versailles had enhanced its geopolitical position. Not even a vastly more
catastrophic defeat in World War II would succeed in eliminating Germany’s
influence in Europe. Rather than seeing Stresemann as a precursor of the Nazi
assault on Western values, it would be more accurate to view Nazi excesses as an
interruption of Stresemann’s gradual and almost certainly peaceful progression
to achieving a decisive role for his country in Europe.
Over time, tactic for Stresemann might well have turned into strategy, and
expedient into conviction. In our own period, the original motive for President
Sadat’s rapprochement with Israel was almost certainly to undermine the West’s
image of Arab bellicosity and to place Israel on the psychological defensive.
Like Stresemann, Sadat tried to drive a wedge between his adversary and its
friends. By fulfilling reasonable Israeli demands, he hoped to weaken its
ultimate refusal to return Arab, and especially Egyptian, land. But as time went
on, Sadat actually turned into the apostle of peace and the healer of international
rifts, which at first may well have been a pose. In time, the pursuit of peace and
conciliation ceased to be for Sadat tools of the national interest and turned into
values in and of themselves. Was Stresemann heading along a similar path? His
premature death has left us with that possibility as one of history’s unsolved
riddles.
At the time of Stresemann’s death, the reparations issue was on the way to
being resolved, and Germany’s western border had been settled. Germany
remained revisionist with respect to its eastern borders and to the disarmament
provisions of the Versailles Treaty. The attempt to pressure Germany by
occupying its territory had failed, and the modified collective security approach
of Locarno had not stilled German claims for parity. The statesmen of Europe
now took refuge in an all-out commitment to disarmament as their best hope for
peace.
The notion that Germany was entitled to parity had by now become fixed in
the British mind. As early as in his first term in office, in 1924, Labour Prime
Minister Ramsay MacDonald had proclaimed disarmament as his top priority. In
his second term, starting in 1929, he stopped construction of a naval base in
Singapore and the building of new cruisers and submarines. In 1932, his
government announced a moratorium on airplane construction. MacDonald’s
principal adviser on the subject, Philip Noel-Baker, declared that only
disarmament could prevent another war.
The basic inconsistency between parity for Germany and security for France
remained unresolved, however, perhaps because it was irresoluble. In 1932, a
year before Hitler came to power, French Prime Minister Edouard Herriot
predicted: “I have no illusions. I am convinced that Germany wishes to rearm….
We are at a turning point in history. Until now Germany has practised a policy of
submission…. [N]ow she is beginning a positive policy. Tomorrow it will be a
policy of territorial demands.”21 The most remarkable aspect of this statement
was its passive, resigned tone. Herriot said nothing about the French army, which
was still the largest in Europe; about the Rhineland, demilitarized under
Locarno; about a still-disarmed Germany; or about French responsibility for the
security of Eastern Europe. Unwilling to fight for its convictions, France now
simply awaited its fate.
Great Britain saw matters on the Continent from a quite different perspective.
Wanting to conciliate Germany, it relentlessly pressed France to accede to
German parity in armaments. Disarmament experts are notoriously ingenious in
coming up with schemes which meet the formal aspect of security issues without
addressing the substance. Thus, the British experts devised a proposal granting
Germany parity but without allowing conscription, thereby theoretically putting
a premium on France’s larger pool of trained reserves (as if Germany, having
come this far, could not find a means to evade this last, relatively minor,
restriction).
In that same fateful year before Hitler’s rise to power, the democratic German
government felt confident enough to walk out of the Disarmament Conference in
protest against what it called French discrimination. It was wooed back with the
promise of “[e]quality of rights in a system which would provide security for all
nations,”22 a weaseling phrase implying the theoretical right to parity with
“security” provisions which made it too difficult to achieve. The public mood
had gone beyond such subtleties. The leftist New Statesman greeted the formula
as “the unqualified recognition of the principle of the equality of states.” At the
other end of the British political spectrum, the Times spoke approvingly of “the
timely redress of inequality.”23
The formula of “equality [within] a system [of] security” was, however, a
contradiction in terms. France was no longer strong enough to defend itself
against Germany, and Great Britain continued to refuse the military alliance with
France that could have established a crude approximation of geopolitical
equality (though, based on the experience of the war, even that was
questionable). While insisting on defining equality in the purely formalistic
terms of ending the discriminatory treatment of Germany, England remained
silent about the impact of such equality on the European equilibrium. In 1932, an
exasperated Prime Minister MacDonald told French Foreign Minister PaulBoncour: “French demands always created the difficulty that they required of
Great Britain that she should assume further obligations, and this at the moment
could not be contemplated.”24 This demoralizing impasse continued until Hitler
walked out of disarmament negotiations in October 1933.
After a decade in which diplomacy had focused on Europe, it was—
unexpectedly—Japan which demonstrated the hollowness of collective security
and of the League itself, ushering in a decade of mounting violence in the 1930s.
In 1931, Japanese forces occupied Manchuria, which legally was a part of
China, although the authority of the Chinese central government had not
operated there for many years. Intervention on such a scale had not been
attempted since the founding of the League. But the League had no enforcement
machinery for even the economic sanctions contemplated in its article 16. In its
hesitations, the League exemplified the basic dilemma of collective security: no
country was prepared to fight a war against Japan (or was in a position to do so
without American participation, since the Japanese navy dominated Asian
waters). Even if the machinery for economic sanctions had existed, no country
was willing to curtail trade with Japan in the midst of the Depression; on the
other hand, no country was willing to accept the occupation of Manchuria. None
of the League members knew how to overcome these self-inflicted
contradictions.
Finally, a mechanism was devised for doing nothing at all. It took the form of
a fact-finding mission—the standard device for diplomats signaling that inaction
is the desired outcome. Such commissions take time to assemble, to undertake
studies, and to reach a consensus—by which point, with luck, the problem might
even have gone away. Japan felt so confident of this pattern that it took the lead
in recommending such a study. What came to be known as the Lytton
Commission reported that Japan had justified grievances but had erred by not
first exhausting all peaceful means of redress. This mildest of rebukes for
occupying a territory larger than itself proved too much for Japan, which
responded by withdrawing from the League of Nations. It was the first step
toward the unraveling of the entire institution.
In Europe, the whole incident was treated as a kind of aberration peculiar to
distant continents. Disarmament talks continued as if there were no Manchurian
crisis, turning the debate over security versus parity into a largely ceremonial
act. Then, on January 30, 1933, Hitler came to power in Germany and
demonstrated that the Versailles system had indeed been a house of cards.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The End of Illusion: Hitler and the
Destruction of Versailles
Hitler’s advent to power marked one of the greatest calamities in the history of
the world. But for him, the collapse of the house of cards which represented the
Versailles international order might have proceeded in a peaceful, or at least
noncatastrophic, fashion. That Germany would emerge from that process as the
strongest nation on the Continent was inevitable; the orgy of killing and
devastation that it unleashed was the work of one demonic personality.
Hitler attained eminence through his oratory. Unlike other revolutionary
leaders, he was a solitary political adventurer representing no major school of
political thought. His philosophy, as expressed in Mein Kampf, ranged from the
banal to the fantastic and consisted of a popularized repackaging of right-wing,
radical, conventional wisdom. Standing alone, it could never have launched an
intellectual current that culminated in revolution, as had Marx’s Das Kapital or
the works of the philosophers of the eighteenth century.
Demagogic skill catapulted Hitler to the leadership of Germany and remained
his stock in trade throughout his career. With the instincts of an outcast and an
unerring eye for psychological weaknesses, he shunted his adversaries from
disadvantage to disadvantage, until they were thoroughly demoralized and ready
to acquiesce to his domination. Internationally, he ruthlessly exploited the
democracies’ guilty conscience about the Treaty of Versailles.
As the head of government, Hitler operated by instinct rather than analysis.
Fancying himself an artist, he resisted sedentary habits and was constantly and
restlessly on the move. He disliked Berlin and found solace in his Bavarian
retreat, to which he would repair for months at a time, though he quickly grew
bored even there. Since he disdained orderly work procedures and his ministers
found it difficult to gain access to him, policymaking occurred in fits and starts.
Anything consistent with his flashes of frenetic activity thrived; anything
requiring sustained effort tended to languish.
The essence of demagoguery resides in the ability to distill emotion and
frustration into a single moment. Gratifying that moment and achieving a
mesmeric, nearly sensual relationship with his entourage and the public at large
became Hitler’s specialties. Abroad, Hitler was most successful when the world
perceived him as pursuing normal, limited objectives. All his great foreign
policy triumphs occurred in the first five years of his rule, 1933–38, and were
based on his victims’ assumption that his aim was to reconcile the Versailles
system with its purported principles.
Once Hitler abandoned the pretense of rectifying injustice, his credibility
vanished. Embarking on naked conquest for its own sake made him lose his
touch. There were still occasional flashes of intuition, as in his design of the
campaign against France in 1940 and in his refusal to permit a retreat in front of
Moscow in 1941, which would almost certainly have caused a collapse of the
German army. However, Hitler’s seminal experience seems to have been
Germany’s defeat in World War I. He never ceased to recount how he first
learned of it while bedridden in a military hospital, partially blinded by mustard
gas. Ascribing Germany’s collapse to treachery, a Jewish conspiracy, and lack of
will, he would for the rest of his life insist that Germany could be defeated only
by itself, not by foreigners. This line of thinking transmuted the defeat of 1918
into treason, while the failure on the part of Germany’s leaders to fight to the end
became a staple of Hitler’s obsessive rhetoric and mind-numbing monologues.
Hitler always seemed strangely unfulfilled by his victories; in the end, he only
seemed able to realize his image of himself by overcoming imminent collapse
through sheer willpower. Psychologists may find therein one explanation for his
conducting the war in a manner that seemed to lack a strategic or political
rationale until Germany’s resources had been squandered and Hitler could
finally, and still unyieldingly, fulfill himself by defying the world in a bomb
shelter in the encircled capital of his almost completely occupied country.
Demagogic skill and egomania were two sides of the same coin. Hitler was
incapable of normal conversation, and either engaged in long monologues or
lapsed into bored silences when some interlocutor managed to seize the floor—
and at times even dozed off.1 Hitler was wont to ascribe his, in truth, nearly
miraculous rise from Vienna’s netherworld to unchallenged rule over Germany
to personal qualities unrivaled by any contemporary. Thus, a recital of his rise to
power entered the deadening liturgy of Hitler’s “table talks” as transcribed by his
disciples.2
Hitler’s egomania had deadlier consequences as well; he had convinced
himself—and, what is more significant, his entourage—that, because his
faculties were so unique, all his goals had to be accomplished in his own
lifetime. Since, on the basis of his family history, he had estimated that his life
would be relatively short, he was never able to permit any of his successes to
mature, and pushed forward according to a timetable established by his
assessment of his physical powers. History offers no other example of a major
war being started on the basis of medical conjecture.
When all was said and done, Hitler’s startling early successes amounted to an
accelerated harvesting of opportunities which had been created by the policies of
the predecessors he despised, especially Stresemann. Like the Peace of
Westphalia, the Treaty of Versailles left a powerful country confronting a group
of much smaller and unprotected states on its eastern border. The difference,
however, was that while this had been intentional at Westphalia, quite the
opposite was true of Versailles. Versailles and Locarno had smoothed Germany’s
road into Eastern Europe, where a patient German leadership would in time have
achieved a preponderant position by peaceful means, or perhaps even have had it
handed to it by the West. But Hitler’s reckless megalomania turned what could
have been a peaceful evolution into a world war.
At first, Hitler’s true nature was obscured by his seeming ordinariness. Neither
the German nor the Western European establishment believed that he really
meant to overturn the existing order, even though he announced his intentions to
that effect often enough. Tired of harassment by the ever-growing Nazi Party,
demoralized by the Depression and political chaos, a conservative German
leadership appointed Hitler as Chancellor, and tried to reassure itself by
surrounding him with respectable conservatives (there were only three Nazi
Party members in Hitler’s first Cabinet of January 30, 1933). Hitler, however,
had not come all that long way to be contained by parliamentary maneuvers.
With a few brusque strokes (and on June 30, 1934, a purge assassinating a
number of rivals and opponents), he made himself dictator of Germany within
eighteen months of taking office.
The Western democracies’ initial reaction to Hitler’s ascendancy was to
accelerate their commitment to disarmament. Germany’s government was now
headed by a chancellor who had proclaimed his intention to overthrow the
Versailles settlement, to rearm, and then to engage in a policy of expansion.
Even so, the democracies saw no need for taking special precautions. If
anything, Hitler’s accession to power strengthened Great Britain’s determination
to pursue disarmament. Some British diplomats even thought that Hitler
represented a better hope for peace than the less stable governments which had
preceded him. “[Hitler’s] signature would bind all Germany like no other
German’s in all her past,”3 British Ambassador Phipps wrote exuberantly to the
Foreign Office. A British guarantee for France was unnecessary, according to
Ramsay MacDonald, because, if Germany broke a disarmament agreement, “the
strength of world opposition to her cannot be exaggerated.”4
France, of course, was not reassured by such soothing pronouncements. Its
chief problem still remained how to find security if Germany rearmed and Great
Britain refused a guarantee. If world public opinion were really all that decisive
in dealing with violators, why should Great Britain be so reluctant to give a
guarantee? Because “public opinion in England would not support it,” replied Sir
John Simon, the Foreign Secretary, thus making explicit France’s nightmare that
Great Britain could not be relied on to defend what it would not guarantee.5 But
why would the British public not support a guarantee? Because it did not
consider such an attack likely, replied Stanley Baldwin, head of the Conservative
Party and in all but name leader of the British government:
If it could be proved that Germany was rearming, then a new situation would immediately arise,
which Europe would have to face…. If that situation arose, His Majesty’s Government would have to
consider it very seriously, but that situation had not yet arisen.6
The argument was endlessly circular and endlessly contradictory: a guarantee
was both too risky and unnecessary; after achieving parity, Germany would be
satisfied. Yet a guarantee of what Germany presumably was not challenging
would be too dangerous even though the condemnation of world opinion would
stop a violator in its tracks. Finally, Hitler himself put an end to the evasions and
the hypocrisy. On October 14, 1933, Germany left the Disarmament Conference
forever—not because Hitler had been rebuffed but because he was afraid that
German demands for parity might be met, thereby thwarting his desires for
unrestricted rearmament. A week later, Hitler withdrew from the League of
Nations. In early 1934, he announced German rearmament. In separating itself
from the world community in this way, Germany did not suffer any visible
damage.
Hitler had clearly laid down a challenge, yet the democracies were uncertain
as to what it really meant. By rearming, was Hitler not in fact implementing
what most members of the League had already conceded in principle? Why react
before Hitler had in fact committed some definable act of aggression? After all,
was that not what collective security was all about? In this manner, the leaders of
the Western democracies avoided the pain of being obliged to make ambiguous
choices. It was much easier to wait for some clear demonstration of Hitler’s bad
faith because, in its absence, public backing for strong measures could not be
relied on—or so the leaders of the democracies thought. Hitler, of course, had
every incentive to obscure his true intentions until it was too late for the Western
democracies to mount effective resistance. In any event, the democratic
statesmen of the interwar period feared war more than they feared a weakening
of the balance of power. Security, argued Ramsay MacDonald, must be sought
“not by military but by moral means.”
Hitler skillfully exploited such attitudes by periodically launching peace
offensives that were deftly geared to the illusions of his potential victims. When
he withdrew from the disarmament talks, he offered to limit the German army to
300,000 men and the German air force to half the size of that of France. The
offer diverted attention from the fact that Germany had scrapped the limit of
100,000 established at Versailles while seemingly agreeing to new ceilings that
could not be reached for several years—at which point those limits, too, would
no doubt be jettisoned.
France refused the offer, declaring it would look after its own security. The
haughtiness of the French reply could not obscure the reality that France’s
nightmare—military parity with Germany (or worse)—was now upon it. Great
Britain drew the conclusion that disarmament had become more important than
ever. The Cabinet announced: “Our policy is still to seek by international
cooperation the limitation and reduction of world armaments, as our obligations
under the Covenant and as the only means to prevent a race in armaments.”7
Indeed, the Cabinet reached the extraordinary decision that the best option was
to bargain from what, by its own estimate, was turning into a position of
weakness. On November 29, 1933—six weeks after Hitler had ordered the
German delegation to leave the Disarmament Conference—Baldwin told the
Cabinet:
If we had no hope of achieving any limitation of armaments we should have every right to feel
disquietude as to the situation not only so far as concerns the Air Force, but also the Army and Navy.
[Britain was] using every possible effort to bring about a scheme of disarmament which would
include Germany.8
Since Germany was rearming and the state of British defenses was, in Baldwin’s
own words, disquieting, a greater British defense effort might indeed have
seemed to be in order. Yet Baldwin took exactly the opposite approach. He
continued a freeze in the production of military aircraft, which had been
instituted in 1932. The gesture was intended “as a further earnest of His
Majesty’s Government’s desire to promote the work of the Disarmament
Conference.”9 Baldwin failed to explain what incentive Hitler would have to
negotiate disarmament as long as Great Britain was engaging in unilateral
disarmament. (A more charitable explanation for Baldwin’s actions is that Great
Britain was developing new models of aircraft; having nothing to produce until
these were ready, Baldwin was making a virtue out of a necessity.) As for
France, it took refuge in wishful thinking. The British Ambassador to Paris
reported: “France has, in fact, fallen back on a policy of extreme caution, she is
opposed to any forceful measures which would savour of military adventure.”10
A report to Edouard Daladier, then Minister of War, shows that even France had
begun to lean toward League orthodoxy. The French military attaché in Berlin
proclaimed disarmament as the most effective way of containing Hitler, having
convinced himself that more dangerous fanatics than Hitler were lurking in the
wings:
It seems that there is no other way for us than to reach an understanding which will contain… at least
for a while, Germany’s military development…. If Hitler is sincere in proclaiming his desire for
peace, we will be able to congratulate ourselves on having reached agreement; if he has other designs
or if he has to give way one day to some fanatic we will at least have postponed the outbreak of a war
and that is indeed a gain.11
Great Britain and France opted to let German rearmament unfold because, quite
literally, they did not know what else to do. Great Britain was not yet prepared to
give up on collective security and the League, and France had become so
dispirited that it could not bring itself to act on its premonitions: France dared
not act alone, and Great Britain refused to act in concert.
In retrospect, it is easy to ridicule the fatuousness of the assessment of Hitler’s
motives by his contemporaries. But his ambitions, not to mention his criminality,
were not all that apparent at the outset. In his first two years in office, Hitler was
primarily concerned with solidifying his rule. But in the eyes of many British
and French leaders, Hitler’s truculent foreign policy style was more than
counterbalanced by his staunch anticommunism, and by his restoration of the
German economy.
Statesmen always face the dilemma that, when their scope for action is
greatest, they have a minimum of knowledge. By the time they have garnered
sufficient knowledge, the scope for decisive action is likely to have vanished. In
the 1930s, British leaders were too unsure about Hitler’s objectives and French
leaders too unsure about themselves to act on the basis of assessments which
they could not prove. The tuition fee for learning about Hitler’s true nature was
tens of millions of graves stretching from one end of Europe to the other. On the
other hand, had the democracies forced a showdown with Hitler early in his rule,
historians would still be arguing about whether Hitler had been a misunderstood
nationalist or a maniac bent on world domination.
The West’s obsession with Hitler’s motives was, of course, misguided in the
first place. The tenets of the balance of power should have made it clear that a
large and strong Germany bordered on the east by small and weak states was a
dangerous threat. Realpolitik teaches that, regardless of Hitler’s motives,
Germany’s relations with its neighbors would be determined by their relative
power. The West should have spent less time assessing Hitler’s motives and
more time counterbalancing Germany’s growing strength.
No one has stated the result of the Western Allies’ hesitancy to confront Hitler
better than Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s diabolical propaganda chief. In April 1940,
on the eve of the Nazi invasion of Norway, he told a secret briefing:
Up to now we have succeeded in leaving the enemy in the dark concerning Germany’s real goals, just
as before 1932 our domestic foes never saw where we were going or that our oath of legality was just
a trick…. They could have suppressed us. They could have arrested a couple of us in 1925 and that
would have been that, the end. No, they let us through the danger zone. That’s exactly how it was in
foreign policy too…. In 1933 a French premier ought to have said (and if I had been the French
premier I would have said it): “The new Reich Chancellor is the man who wrote Mein Kampf, which
says this and that. This man cannot be tolerated in our vicinity. Either he disappears or we march!”
But they didn’t do it. They left us alone and let us slip through the risky zone, and we were able to
sail around all dangerous reefs. And when we were done, and well armed, better than they, then they
started the war! [Italics in original.]12
The leaders of the democracies refused to face the fact that, once Germany
attained a given level of armaments, Hitler’s real intentions would become
irrelevant. The rapid growth of German military strength was bound to overturn
the equilibrium unless it was either stopped or balanced.
This in fact was Churchill’s lonely message. But in the 1930s, the lead time
for recognizing prophets was still quite long. So the British leaders, in a rare
show of unanimity extending across the entire political spectrum, rejected
Churchill’s warnings. Starting from the premise that disarmament, not
preparedness, was the key to peace, they treated Hitler as a psychological
problem, not a strategic danger.
When, in 1934, Churchill urged that Great Britain respond to German
rearmament by a buildup in the Royal Air Force, government and opposition
leaders united in scorn. Herbert Samuel spoke on behalf of the Liberal Party: “It
would seem as if he were engaged not in giving sound, sane advice… but… in a
reckless game of bridge…. All these formulas are dangerous.”13 Sir Stafford
Cripps put forward the Labour Party’s case with supercilious sarcasm:
One could picture him as some old baron in the Middle Ages who is laughing at the idea of the
possibility of disarmament in the baronies of this country and pointing out that the only way in which
he and his feudal followers could maintain their safety and their cows was by having as strong an
armament as possible.14
Conservative Prime Minister Baldwin made the rejection of Churchill
unanimous when he informed the House of Commons that he had not “given up
hope either for the limitation or for the restriction of some kind of arms.”
According to Baldwin, accurate information about German air strength was
“extraordinarily difficult” to obtain—though he did not reveal why this should
be so.15 Nevertheless, he was confident that “[i]t is not the case that Germany is
rapidly approaching equality with us.”16 Baldwin felt “no ground at this moment
for undue alarm and still less for panic.” Chiding Churchill’s figures as
“exaggerated,” he stressed that “there is no immediate menace confronting us or
anyone in Europe at this moment—no actual emergency.”17
France sought shelter behind an accumulation of halfhearted alliances by
transforming the unilateral guarantees of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Romania
of the 1920s into mutual defense treaties. It meant that those countries would
now be obliged to come to France’s assistance even if Germany chose to settle
scores with France before turning east.
It was an empty, indeed a pathetic, gesture. The alliances were logical enough
as French guarantees for the weak new states of Eastern Europe. But they were
not suited for serving as the sort of mutual assistance treaties which would
confront Germany with the risk of a two-front war. They were too weak to rein
in Germany in the East; offensive operations against Germany to relieve France
were out of the question. Underscoring the irrelevance of these pacts, Poland
balanced its commitments to France with a nonaggression treaty with Germany
so that, in case of an attack on France, Poland’s formal obligations would cancel
each other out—or, more precisely, they would leave Poland free to choose that
alignment which promised it the greatest benefit at the moment of crisis.
A new Franco-Soviet agreement signed in 1935 demonstrated the magnitude
of France’s psychological and political demoralization. Before World War I,
France had eagerly sought a political alliance with Russia and did not rest until
that political understanding had been turned into a military pact. In 1935,
France’s position was strategically far weaker and its need for Soviet military
support nearly desperate. Nevertheless, France grudgingly concluded a political
alliance with the Soviet Union while adamantly rejecting military staff talks. As
late as 1937, France would not permit Soviet observers to attend its annual
maneuvers.
There were three reasons for the aloof behavior of French leaders, all of which
surely magnified Stalin’s congenital distrust of the Western democracies. The
first was their fear that too close an association with the Soviet Union would
weaken France’s indispensable ties to Great Britain. Second, France’s Eastern
European allies, situated between the Soviet Union and Germany, were not
prepared to permit Soviet troops to enter their territory, rendering it difficult to
find a subject for meaningful Franco-Soviet staff talks. Finally, as early as 1938,
French leaders felt so intimidated by Germany that they feared staff talks with
the Soviet Union might, in the words of then Prime Minister Chautemps,
“produce a declaration of war by Germany.”18
France thus ended up in a military alliance with countries too weak to help it,
a political alliance with the Soviet Union with which it dared not cooperate
militarily, and strategic dependence on Great Britain, which flatly refused to
consider any military commitment. This arrangement was a prescription for a
nervous breakdown, not a grand strategy.
The only serious moves France made in response to growing German strength
were in the direction of Italy. Mussolini was not exactly a devotee of collective
security but he had a clear sense of Italy’s limitations, especially where Germany
was concerned. He feared that German annexation of Austria would lead to a
demand for the return of the South Tirol, which was ethnically German. In
January 1935, then Foreign Minister Pierre Laval concluded what came close to
being a military alliance. Agreeing to consult each other in the event of any
threat to the independence of Austria, Italy and France initiated military-staff
talks in which they went so far as to discuss stationing Italian troops along the
Rhine and French troops along the Austrian frontier.
Three months later, after Hitler had reintroduced conscription, an
approximation of an alliance among Great Britain, France, and Italy seemed to
be developing. Their heads of government met in the Italian resort of Stresa,
where they agreed to resist any German attempt to change the Versailles Treaty
by force. It was a minor historical irony that Mussolini should have hosted a
conference to defend the Versailles settlement since he had long been a critic of
Versailles, arguing that the treaty had shortchanged Italy.
Stresa was to be the last time that the victors of the First World War
considered joint action. Two months after the conference, Great Britain signed a
naval accord with Germany, which showed that, where its own security was
concerned, Great Britain preferred to rely on bilateral deals with the adversary
rather than on its Stresa partners. Germany agreed to limit its fleet to thirty-five
percent of Great Britain’s for the next ten years, though it was granted the right
to an equal number of submarines.
The terms of the Naval Treaty were less significant than what they revealed
about the state of mind of the democracies. The British Cabinet surely realized
that the naval agreement in effect acquiesced to the German abrogation of the
naval provisions of the Versailles Treaty and thereby, at a minimum, went
against the spirit of the Stresa front. Its practical effect was to establish new
ceilings on a bilateral basis—ceilings, moreover, at the outer limit of Germany’s
capacity to build—a method of arms control that was to become increasingly
popular during the Cold War. The naval agreement also signified that Great
Britain preferred to conciliate the adversary rather than rely on its partners in the
Stresa front—the psychological framework for what later came to be known as
the policy of appeasement.
Soon thereafter, the Stresa front collapsed altogether. An adherent of
Realpolitik, Mussolini took it for granted that he had a free hand for the kind of
colonial expansion that had been routine prior to World War I. Consequently, he
set about carving out an African empire in 1935 by conquering Abyssinia,
Africa’s last independent nation, and, in the process, avenging an Italian
humiliation by Abyssinian forces dating back to the turn of the century.
But, whereas Mussolini’s aggression would have been accepted prior to World
War I, it was now being initiated in a world that was in thrall to collective
security and the League of Nations. Public opinion, especially in Great Britain,
had already castigated the League for “failing” to prevent Japan’s conquest of
Manchuria; in the interim, a mechanism for economic sanctions had been put in
place. By the time Italy invaded Abyssinia in 1935, the League had an official
remedy for such aggression. Abyssinia was, moreover, a member of the League
of Nations, though only as the result of a rather curious reversal of
circumstances. In 1925, Italy had sponsored Abyssinia’s admission to the League
in order to check presumed British designs. Great Britain had acquiesced
reluctantly, after arguing that Abyssinia was too barbaric for full-fledged
membership in the international community.
Now both countries were hoist by their own petard: Italy, by engaging in what
had, by any standard, been unprovoked aggression against a member of the
League; Great Britain, because it faced a challenge to collective security and not
just another African colonial problem. To complicate matters, Great Britain and
France had already conceded at Stresa that Abyssinia lay within Italy’s sphere of
interest. Laval was to say later that he had had in mind a role for Italy similar to
that of France in Morocco—that is, one of indirect control. But Mussolini could
not be expected to understand that France and Great Britain, having conceded
this much, would sacrifice a near-alliance against Germany over the distinction
between annexation and indirect control over Abyssinia.
France and Great Britain never came to grips with the reality that they faced
two mutually exclusive options. If they concluded that Italy was essential to
protecting Austria and, indirectly, perhaps even to helping maintain the
demilitarized Rhineland it had guaranteed at Locarno, they would have needed
to come up with some compromise to save Italy’s face in Africa and to keep the
Stresa front intact. Alternatively, if the League was indeed the best instrument
for both containing Germany and for rallying the Western public against
aggression, it was necessary to pursue sanctions until it had been demonstrated
that aggression did not pay. There was no middle ground.
Yet the middle ground was exactly what the democracies, no longer having
the self-confidence to define their choices, sought. Under British leadership, the
League machinery of economic sanctions was activated. At the same time, Laval
privately assured Mussolini that Italy’s access to oil would not be disrupted.
Great Britain pursued essentially the same course by politely inquiring in Rome
whether oil sanctions would lead to war. When Mussolini—both predictably and
untruthfully—answered in the affirmative, the British Cabinet had the alibi it
needed to combine its support for the League with an appeal to the widespread
dread of war. This policy came to be expressed in the slogan “all sanctions short
of war.”
Later, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was to say somewhat wistfully that any
sanctions that were likely to have worked would also have been likely to lead to
war. So much, at any rate, for the notion that economic sanctions provide an
alternative to force in resisting aggression—an argument that would be repeated
some fifty years later in the United States over the issue of how to deal with
Iraq’s annexation of Kuwait, albeit with a happier outcome.
Foreign Secretary Samuel Hoare understood that Great Britain had derailed its
own strategy. To resist the impending German threat, Great Britain’s leaders
should have confronted Hitler and conciliated Mussolini. They did just the
opposite: they appeased Germany and confronted Italy. Grasping the absurdity of
this state of affairs, Hoare and Laval devised a compromise in December 1935:
Italy would receive Abyssinia’s fertile plains; Haile Selassie would continue to
rule in the mountain fastness which was the historical site of his kingdom; Great
Britain would contribute to these compromises by giving landlocked Abyssinia
access to the sea via British Somalia. Mussolini was fully expected to accept the
plan, and Hoare was to present it for League approval.
The Hoare-Laval plan came to naught because it was leaked to the press
before it could be placed before the League of Nations—an extraordinarily rare
event in those days. The resulting cry of outrage forced Hoare to resign—the
victim of seeking a practical compromise in the face of an aroused public
opinion. Anthony Eden, his successor, speedily returned to the cocoon of
collective security and economic sanctions—without, however, being willing to
resort to force.
In a pattern that would be repeated in successive crises, the democracies
justified their aversion to using force by vastly overestimating the military
prowess of the adversary. London convinced itself that it could not handle the
Italian fleet without French assistance. France went along halfheartedly and
moved its fleet to the Mediterranean, further jeopardizing its relationship with
Italy as a Locarno guarantor and a Stresa partner. Even with this overwhelming
accumulation of force, oil sanctions were never invoked. And ordinary sanctions
did not work rapidly enough to prevent Abyssinia’s defeat—if indeed they could
have worked at all.
Italy’s conquest of Abyssinia was completed by May 1936, when Mussolini
proclaimed the king of Italy, Victor Emmanuel, as emperor of the newly named
Ethiopia. Less than two months later, on June 30, the Council of the League of
Nations met to consider the fait accompli. Haile Selassie sounded the death knell
of collective security in a forlorn personal appeal:
It is not merely a question of a settlement in the matter of Italian aggression. It is a question of
collective security; of the very existence of the League; of the trust placed by States in international
treaties; of the value of promises made to small states that their integrity and their independence shall
be respected and assured. It is a choice between the principle of equality of States and the imposition
upon small Powers of the bonds of vassalage.19
On July 15, the League lifted all sanctions against Italy. Two years later, in the
wake of Munich, Great Britain and France subordinated their moral objections to
their fear of Germany by recognizing the Abyssinian conquest. Collective
security had condemned Haile Selassie to losing all of his country rather than the
half he would have lost under the Realpolitik of the Hoare-Laval plan.
In terms of military power, Italy was not remotely comparable to Great
Britain, France, or Germany. But the void created by the aloofness of the Soviet
Union turned Italy into a useful auxiliary in maintaining the independence of
Austria and, to a limited extent, of the demilitarized Rhineland. As long as Great
Britain and France had appeared to be the strongest nations in Europe, Mussolini
had supported the Versailles settlement, especially since he profoundly distrusted
Germany and at first disdained Hitler’s personality. His resentment over
Ethiopia, coupled with his analysis of the actual power relationships, convinced
Mussolini that persistence in the Stresa front might end up compelling Italy to
bear the full brunt of German aggressiveness. Ethiopia therefore marked the
beginning of Italy’s inexorable march toward Germany, motivated in equal parts
by acquisitiveness and fear.
It was in Germany, however, that the Ethiopian fiasco left the most lasting
impression. The British Ambassador in Berlin reported: “Italy’s victory opened a
new chapter. It was unavoidable that in a land where power is worshipped
England’s prestige would sink.”20 With Italy out of the Stresa front, Germany’s
sole remaining obstacle on the road to Austria and Central Europe was the open
door provided by the demilitarized Rhineland. And Hitler wasted no time
slamming it.
On the morning of Sunday, March 7, 1936, Hitler ordered his army into the
demilitarized Rhineland, marking the overthrow of the last remaining safeguard
of the Versailles settlement. According to the Versailles Treaty, German military
forces were barred from the Rhineland and a zone of fifty kilometers to the east
of it. Germany had confirmed this provision at Locarno; the League of Nations
had endorsed Locarno, and Great Britain, France, Belgium, and Italy had
guaranteed it.
If Hitler could prevail in the Rhineland, Eastern Europe would be at
Germany’s mercy. None of the new states of Eastern Europe stood a chance of
defending themselves against a revisionist Germany, either through their own
efforts or in combination with each other. Their only hope was that France could
deter German aggression by threatening to march into the Rhineland.
Once again, the Western democracies were torn by uncertainty over Hitler’s
intentions. Technically, he was merely reoccupying German territory.
Simultaneously, he was offering all sorts of reassurances, including the offer of a
nonaggression treaty with France. Once again, it was argued that Germany
would be satisfied as soon as it had been conceded the right to defend its own
national borders, something every other European nation simply took for
granted. Did British and French leaders have the moral right to risk their
peoples’ lives in order to maintain a so blatantly discriminatory state of affairs?
On the other hand, was it not their moral duty to confront Hitler while Germany
was not yet fully armed, and thereby possibly save untold lives?
History has given the answer; contemporaries, however, were tormented by
doubt. For, in 1936, Hitler continued to benefit from his unique combination of
psychotic intuition and demonic willpower. The democracies still believed that
they were dealing with a normal, if somewhat excessive, national leader who
was seeking to restore his country to a position of equality in Europe. Great
Britain and France were absorbed in trying to read Hitler’s mind. Was he
sincere? Did he really want peace? To be sure, these were valid questions, but
foreign policy builds on quicksand when it disregards actual power relationships
and relies on prophesies of another’s intentions.
With his uncanny ability to exploit his adversaries’ weaknesses, Hitler chose
precisely the right moment to reoccupy the Rhineland. The League of Nations,
bogged down in sanctions against Italy, was far from eager to take on a
confrontation with another major power. The war in Abyssinia had driven a
wedge between the Western Powers and Italy, one of the guarantors of Locarno.
Great Britain, another guarantor, having just recoiled from imposing oil
sanctions against Italy at sea, where it was dominant, would surely be even less
eager to risk ground warfare for a cause which involved no violation of national
boundaries.
Though no country had a bigger stake in a demilitarized Rhineland than
France, none was more ambivalent about resisting Germany’s violation of it. The
Maginot Line bespoke France’s obsession with the strategic defensive, and the
military equipment and training of the French army left little doubt that the First
World War had quenched its traditional offensive spirit. France seemed resigned
to await its fate behind the Maginot Line and to risk nothing beyond its frontiers
—not in Eastern Europe or, for that matter, in the Rhineland.
Nevertheless, the reoccupation of the Rhineland represented a bold gamble on
Hitler’s part. Conscription had been in effect for less than a year. The German
army was far from ready for war. Indeed, the small advance guard entering the
demilitarized zone was ordered to conduct a fighting retreat at the first signs of
French intervention. Hitler, however, compensated for his lack of military
strength with ample psychological daring. He flooded the democracies with
proposals hinting at his willingness to discuss troop limitations in the Rhineland
and to bring Germany back into the League of Nations. He appealed to
widespread distrust of the Soviet Union by claiming his move was a riposte to
the Franco-Soviet Pact of 1935. He offered a fifty-kilometer demilitarized zone
on both sides of the German frontier and a twenty-five-year nonaggression
treaty. The demilitarization proposal had the double virtue of hinting that
permanent peace was only the stroke of a pen away, while neatly demolishing
the Maginot Line, which backed up against the German frontier.
Hitler’s interlocutors did not require a great deal of encouragement to adopt a
passive stance. A convenient alibi here and there suited their preference for
doing nothing. Ever since Locarno, it had been a cardinal principle of French
policy never to risk war with Germany except in alliance with Great Britain,
though British assistance was technically unnecessary so long as Germany
remained disarmed. In the single-minded pursuit of that goal, French leaders had
swallowed countless frustrations and supported many disarmament initiatives
which, in their hearts, they knew to be ill-conceived.
France’s overwhelming psychological dependence on Great Britain may
explain why it made no military preparations, not even when the French
Ambassador in Berlin, André François-Poncet, warned on November 21, 1935,
that a German move on the Rhineland was imminent—a full three and a half
months before it actually occurred.21 Yet France dared neither to mobilize nor to
undertake precautionary military measures lest it be accused of provoking what
it feared. France also did not raise the issue in negotiations with Germany
because it did not know what to do if Germany ignored its warnings or declared
its intentions.
What is nearly inexplicable about France’s conduct in 1935, however, is why
the French general staff made no provisions whatsoever in its own internal
planning even after François-Poncet’s warning. Did the French general staff not
believe its own diplomats? Was it because France could not bring itself to leave
the shelter of its fortifications even in defense of the vital buffer zone
represented by the demilitarized Rhineland? Or did France already feel so utterly
doomed that its primary goal had become to defer war in the hope that some
unforeseeable change would occur in its favor—though it would no longer be
able to bring such a change about by its own actions?
The towering symbol for this state of mind was, of course, the Maginot Line,
which France had constructed at huge cost over a period of ten years. France had
thereby committed itself to the strategic defensive in the very year when it had
guaranteed the independence of Poland and Czechoslovakia. A sign of equal
confusion was the incomprehensible French decision to stop construction of the
Maginot Line at the Belgian frontier, which belied all the experiences of the First
World War. For, if a Franco-German war was indeed possible, then why not a
German assault through Belgium? If France feared that Belgium would collapse
if it indicated that the main line of defense excluded that country, Belgium could
have been given the choice of agreeing to the extension of the Maginot Line
along the Belgian-German frontier, and, if this were rejected, the Maginot Line
could have been extended to the sea along the Franco-Belgian frontier. France
did neither.
What political leaders decide, intelligence services tend to seek to justify.
Popular literature and films often depict the opposite—policymakers as the
helpless tools of intelligence experts. In the real world, intelligence assessments
more often follow than guide policy decisions. This may explain the wild
exaggeration of German strength that blighted French military estimates. At the
time of the German reoccupation of the Rhineland, General Maurice Gamelin,
the French Commander-in-Chief, told civilian leaders that Germany’s trained
military manpower already equaled that of France, and that Germany had more
equipment than France—an absurd estimate in the second year of German
rearmament. Policy recommendations flowed from this flawed premise of
German military might. Gamelin concluded that France must not undertake any
military countermeasures without general mobilization, a step which its political
leaders would not risk without British support—not even though the German
force entering the Rhineland numbered about 20,000, while the French standing
army could count on 500,000 even without mobilization.
Everything now came back to the dilemma which had bedeviled the
democracies for twenty years. Great Britain would recognize only one threat to
the European balance of power—the violation of France’s borders. Determined
never to fight for Eastern Europe, it perceived no vital British interest in a
demilitarized Rhineland serving as a kind of hostage in the West. Nor would
Great Britain go to war to uphold its own Locarno guarantee. Eden had made
this clear a month before the occupation of the Rhineland. In February 1936, the
French government finally roused itself to inquire of Great Britain what its
position would be if Hitler carried out what François-Poncet had reported.
Eden’s treatment of the potential violation of two international agreements—
Versailles and Locarno—sounded like the opening of a commercial bargain:
…as the zone was constituted primarily to give security to France and Belgium, it is for these two
Governments, in the first instance, to make up their minds as to what value they attach to, and what
price they are prepared to pay for, its maintenance…. It would be preferable for Great Britain and
France to enter betimes into negotiations with the German Government for the surrender on
conditions of our rights in the zone while such surrender still has a bargaining value.22
Eden in effect took the position that the best that could be hoped for was a
negotiation in which the Allies, in return for giving up established and
recognized rights (and in which Great Britain refused to honor its own
guarantee), would receive—what exactly? Time? Other assurances? Great
Britain left the answer regarding the quid pro quo to France, but conveyed by its
conduct that fighting on behalf of solemn obligations in the Rhineland was not
part of the British strategy.
After Hitler marched into the Rhineland, Great Britain’s attitude became even
more explicit. The day after the German move, the British Secretary of State for
War told the German Ambassador:
…though the British people were prepared to fight for France in the event of a German incursion into
French territory, they would not resort to arms on account of the recent occupation of the
Rhineland…. [M]ost of them [the British people] probably took the view that they did not care “two
hoots” about the Germans reoccupying their own territory.23
Great Britain’s doubts were soon extended even to countermeasures short of war.
The Foreign Office told the American chargé d’affaires: “England would make
every endeavour to prevent the imposition of military and/or economic sanctions
against Germany.”24
Foreign Minister Pierre Flandin pleaded France’s case in vain. He presciently
told the British that, once Germany had fortified the Rhineland, Czechoslovakia
would be lost and that, soon after, general war would become unavoidable.
Although he was proved right, it was never altogether clear whether Flandin was
seeking British support for French military action or developing a French alibi
for inaction. Churchill obviously thought the latter, noting dryly, “These were
brave words; but action would have spoken louder.”25
Great Britain was deaf to Flandin’s entreaties. The vast majority of its
leadership still believed that peace depended on disarmament, and that the new
international order would have to be based on reconciliation with Germany. The
British felt that it was more important to rectify the mistakes of Versailles than to
vindicate the commitments of Locarno. A Cabinet minute of March 17—ten
days after Hitler’s move—noted that “our own attitude had been governed by the
desire to utilize Herr Hitler’s offers in order to obtain a permanent settlement.”26
What the Cabinet had to say sotto voce, the Opposition felt quite free to put
forward without restraint. During the course of a debate on defense matters in
the House of Commons that same month, it was declared by Labour member
Arthur Greenwood:
Herr Hitler made a statement sinning with one hand but holding out the olive branch with the other,
which ought to be taken at face value. They may prove to be the most important gestures yet made….
It is idle to say these statements were insincere…. The issue is peace and not defence.27
In other words, the Opposition clearly advocated the revision of Versailles and
the abandonment of Locarno. They wanted Great Britain to sit back and wait for
Hitler’s purposes to become clearer. It was a reasonable policy as long as its
advocates understood that every passing year would increase exponentially the
ultimate cost of resistance should the policy fail.
It is not necessary to retrace step by step the path by which France and Great
Britain attempted to transform strategic dross into political gold, or upheaval into
an opportunity for the policy of appeasement. What matters is that, at the end of
this process, the Rhineland was fortified, Eastern Europe had fallen beyond the
reach of French military assistance, and Italy was moving closer to providing
Hitler’s Germany with its first ally. Just as France had been reconciled to
Locarno by an ambiguous British guarantee—whose virtue in British eyes had
been that it was less than an alliance—so the abrogation of Locarno elicited the
even more ambiguous British commitment to send two divisions to defend
France should the French border be violated.
Once again, Great Britain had skillfully dodged a full commitment to defend
France. But what exactly did it achieve? France, of course, saw through the
evasion but accepted it as a halfhearted British step toward the long-sought
formal alliance. Great Britain interpreted its pledge of two divisions as a means
of restraining France from undertaking a defense of Eastern Europe. For the
British commitment would not apply if the French army invaded Germany in
defense of Czechoslovakia or Poland. On the other hand, two British divisions
were not remotely relevant to the problem of deterring a German attack on
France. Great Britain, the mother country of the balance-of-power policy, had
totally lost touch with its operating principles.
For Hitler, the reoccupation of the Rhineland opened the road to Central
Europe, militarily as well as psychologically. Once the democracies had
accepted it as a fait accompli, the strategic basis for resisting Hitler in Eastern
Europe disappeared. “If on 7 March you could not defend yourself,” asked the
Romanian Foreign Minister, Nicolae Titulescu, of his French counterpart, “how
will you defend us against the aggressor?”28 The question grew increasingly
unanswerable as the Rhineland was being fortified.
Psychologically, the impact of the democracies’ passive stance was even more
profound. Appeasement now became an official policy, and rectifying the
inequities of Versailles the conventional wisdom. In the West, there was no
longer anything left to rectify. But it stood to reason that, if France and Great
Britain would not defend Locarno, which they had guaranteed, there was not a
chance of their upholding the Versailles settlement in Eastern Europe, which
Great Britain had questioned from the beginning and had explicitly refused to
guarantee on more than one occasion—the last time in the undertaking to send
two divisions to France.
By now, France had abandoned the Richelieu traditions. It no longer relied
even on itself, but sought surcease from its dangers through German goodwill. In
August 1936, five months after the reoccupation of the Rhineland, Dr. Hjalmar
Schacht, Germany’s Economics Minister, was received in Paris by Léon Blum—
Socialist Party head and now Prime Minister of a Popular Front government. “I
am a Marxist and a Jew,” said Blum, but “we cannot achieve anything if we treat
ideological barriers as insurmountable.”29 Blum’s Foreign Minister, Yvon
Delbos, was at a loss as to how to describe what this meant practically, other
than “making concessions to Germany piecemeal in order to stave off war.”30
Nor did he explain whether this process had a terminal point. France, the country
which, for 200 years, had fought innumerable wars in Central Europe in order to
control its own fate, had retreated to grasping at whatever security could be
wrung out of trading piecemeal concessions for time and to hoping that, along
the way, either German appetites would become satiated or some other deus ex
machina would remove the danger.
The policy of appeasement which France implemented warily, Great Britain
pursued eagerly. In 1937, the year after the Rhineland was remilitarized, Lord
Halifax, then Lord President, symbolized the democracies’ moral retreat by
visiting Hitler’s aerie at Berchtesgaden. He praised Nazi Germany “as the
bulwark of Europe against Bolshevism” and listed a number of issues with
respect to which “possible alterations might be destined to come about with the
passage of time.” Danzig, Austria, and Czechoslovakia were specifically
mentioned. Halifax’s only caveat related to the method by which the changes
would be accomplished: “England was interested to see that any alterations
should come through the course of peaceful evolution and that methods should
be avoided which might cause far-reaching disturbances.”31
It would have taxed the comprehension of a less determined leader than Hitler
why, if it was prepared to concede adjustments in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and
the Polish Corridor, Great Britain would balk at the method Germany used to
make those adjustments. Having yielded the substance, why should Great Britain
draw the line at procedure? What possible peaceful argument did Halifax expect
could convince the victims of the merits of suicide? League orthodoxy and the
doctrine of collective security had it that it was the method of change which had
to be resisted; but history teaches that nations go to war in order to resist the fact
of change.
By the time of Halifax’s visit to Hitler, France’s strategic situation had
deteriorated even further. In July 1936, a military coup led by General Francisco
Franco had triggered the Spanish Civil War. Franco was openly supported by
large shipments of equipment from Germany and Italy; soon thereafter, German
and Italian “volunteers” were dispatched, and fascism seemed poised to spread
its ideas by force. France now faced the same challenge Richelieu had resisted
300 years earlier—the prospect of hostile governments on all its borders. But
unlike their great predecessor, the French governments of the 1930s dithered,
unable to decide which they feared more—the dangers they were facing or the
means needed to redress them.
Great Britain had participated in the wars of the Spanish succession early in
the eighteenth century, and against Napoleon in Spain a century later. In each
case, Great Britain had resisted the most aggressive European power’s attempt to
draw Spain into its orbit. Now it either failed to perceive a threat to the balance
of power in a fascist victory in Spain or it perceived fascism as a lesser threat
than a radical left-wing Spain tied to the Soviet Union (which seemed to many to
be the most likely alternative). But, above all, Great Britain wanted to avoid a
war. Its Cabinet warned France that Great Britain reserved the right to remain
neutral if a war should result from French arms deliveries to republican Spain—
even though, under international law, France had every right to sell arms to the
legitimate Spanish government. France waffled, then proclaimed an embargo on
arms shipments while periodically acquiescing in its violation. That policy,
however, only demoralized France’s friends and cost France the respect of its
adversaries.
In this atmosphere, French and British leaders met in London on November
29–30, 1937, to chart a common course. Neville Chamberlain, who had replaced
Baldwin as prime minister, came straight to the point. He invited discussion of
the obligations inherent in France’s alliance with Czechoslovakia. This is the sort
of query diplomats initiate when they are looking for loopholes in order to
escape honoring their commitments. Presumably, the independence of Austria
was not even worth talking about.
French Foreign Minister Delbos responded in a manner which conveyed that
he had understood the implications of the question very well indeed. Treating the
Czech issue in terms of juridical rather than political or strategic considerations,
he confined himself to a strictly legal exegesis of France’s obligation:
…this treaty engaged France in the event of Czechoslovakia being a victim of an aggression. If
uprisings among the German population occurred and were supported by armed intervention from
Germany, the treaty committed France in a manner to be determined according to the gravity of the
facts.32
Delbos did not discuss the geopolitical importance of Czechoslovakia or the
impact which France’s abandonment of an ally would have on his country’s
credibility in maintaining the independence of other countries in Eastern Europe.
Instead, he stressed that France’s obligations might or might not apply to the one
realistic existing threat—unrest among Czechoslovakia’s German minority
backed by German military force. Chamberlain grasped at the proffered loophole
and turned it into a rationale for appeasement:
It seemed desirable to try to achieve some agreement with Germany on Central Europe, whatever
might be Germany’s aims, even if she wished to absorb some of her neighbours; one could in effect
hope to delay the execution of German plans, and even to restrain the Reich for such a time that its
plans might become impractical in the long run.33
But if procrastination did not work, what was Great Britain going to do? Having
conceded that Germany would revise its eastern borders, would Great Britain go
to war over the timetable? The answer was self-evident—countries do not go to
war over the rate of change by which something they have already conceded is
being achieved. Czechoslovakia was doomed not at Munich but at London,
nearly a year earlier.
As it happened, Hitler had decided at about the same time to sketch his own
long-term strategy. On November 5, 1937, he called a meeting of his war
minister, the commanders-in-chief of the military services, and his foreign
minister and treated them to a candid exposé of his strategic views. His adjutant,
Hossbach, kept a detailed record. No one present had cause to complain
afterward that he did not know in which direction his leader was heading. For
Hitler made it clear that his aims went far beyond an attempt to restore
Germany’s pre-World War I position. What Hitler outlined was the program of
Mein Kampf—the conquest of large tracts of land in Eastern Europe and in the
Soviet Union for colonization. Hitler knew very well that such a project would
encounter resistance: “German policy [would] have to reckon with the two
hateful antagonists England and France.”34 He stressed that Germany had stolen
a march on Great Britain and France in its rearmament but that the advantage
was transitory and would diminish at an accelerating rate after 1943. War,
therefore, had to start before then.
Hitler’s generals were disturbed by the vastness of his plans and by the
imminence of their execution. But they timidly swallowed Hitler’s designs.
Some military leaders toyed vaguely with the idea of a coup once Hitler had
given the actual order to go to war. But Hitler always moved too fast. His
stunning early successes deprived his generals of the moral justification (in their
eyes) for such a step—not that making coups against constituted authority had
ever been a specialty of German generals.
As for the Western democracies, they did not yet grasp the ideological gulf
that separated them from the German dictator. They believed in peace as an end,
and were straining their every nerve to avoid war. Hitler, on the other hand,
feared peace and craved war. “Mankind has grown strong in eternal struggles,”
he had written in Mein Kampf; “and it will only perish through eternal peace.”35
By 1938, Hitler felt strong enough to cross the national boundaries established
at Versailles. His first target was his native country of Austria, which had been
left in an anomalous position by the settlements of St. Germain in 1919 and
Trianon in 1920 (the equivalent of Versailles for the Austro-Hungarian Empire).
Until 1806, Austria had been the center of the Holy Roman Empire; until 1866,
it had been a leading—for some, the leading—German state. Expelled from its
historic role in Germany by Bismarck, it had shifted its emphasis to its Balkan
and Central European possessions until it lost them as well in the First World
War. A onetime empire shrunk to its small German-speaking core, Austria had
been prohibited by the Treaty of Versailles from joining Germany—a clause
which stood in obvious defiance of the principle of self-determination. Even
though Anschluss with Germany remained the goal of many on both sides of the
Austro-German border (including Stresemann), it was again blocked by the
Allies in 1930.
Thus, the union of Germany and Austria had about it that sense of ambiguity
so essential to the success of Hitler’s early challenges. It fulfilled the principle of
self-determination while undermining the balance of power, which statesmen
were less and less willing to invoke to justify the use of force. After a month of
Nazi threats and Austrian concessions and second thoughts, on March 12, 1938,
German troops marched into Austria. There was no resistance, and the Austrian
population, much of it deliriously joyful, seemed to feel that, shorn of its empire
and left helpless in Central Europe, it preferred a future as a German province to
being a minor player on the Central European stage.
The democracies’ halfhearted protests against Germany’s annexation of
Austria hardly registered moral concern while shying away from any concrete
measures. As the death knell of collective security was sounded, the League of
Nations stood silent while a member country was swallowed by a powerful
neighbor. The democracies now turned doubly committed to appeasement in the
hope that Hitler would stop his march once he had returned all ethnic Germans
to the fatherland.
Destiny chose Czechoslovakia as the subject of that experiment. Like other
successor states of Austro-Hungary, it was nearly as multinational as the Empire
had been. Out of a population of some 15 million, nearly a third were neither
Czech nor Slovak, and the Slovak commitment to the state was shaky. Three and
a half million Germans, close to a million Hungarians, and nearly half a million
Poles were incorporated into the new state. To exacerbate matters, these
minorities dwelled in territories contiguous to their ethnic homelands, which
rendered the claim that they should rejoin their mother countries even more
weighty in light of the prevailing Versailles orthodoxy of self-determination.
At the same time, Czechoslovakia was politically and economically the most
advanced of the successor states. It was genuinely democratic and had a standard
of living comparable to Switzerland’s. It maintained a large army, much of
whose excellent equipment was of domestic Czech design and manufacture; it
had military alliances with France and the Soviet Union. In terms of traditional
diplomacy, therefore, it was no easy matter to abandon Czechoslovakia; in terms
of self-determination, it was equally difficult to defend it. Emboldened by his
successful remilitarization of the Rhineland, Hitler began in 1937 to threaten
Czechoslovakia on behalf of its ethnic Germans. At first, these threats were
ostensibly to pressure the Czechs into granting special rights to the German
minority in “Sudetenland,” as the German propaganda dubbed that territory. But
in 1938, Hitler turned up the heat of his rhetoric by intimating that he intended to
annex Sudetenland into the German Reich by force. France was committed to
protecting Czechoslovakia, as was the Soviet Union, though Soviet help for the
Czechs had been made conditional on prior French actions. Moreover, whether
Poland or Romania would have allowed Soviet troops to traverse their territory
in defense of Czechoslovakia remains very doubtful.
From the start, Great Britain opted for appeasement. On March 22, shortly
after the annexation of Austria, Halifax reminded the French leaders that the
Locarno guarantee applied only to the French border and might lapse if France
implemented its treaty commitments in Central Europe. A Foreign Office
memorandum warned: “Those commitments [the Locarno guarantee] are, in
their view, no mean contribution to the maintenance of peace in Europe and,
though they have no intention of withdrawing from them, they cannot see their
way to add to them.”36 Great Britain’s sole security frontier was at the borders of
France; if France’s security concerns extended any further, specifically, if it tried
to defend Czechoslovakia, it would be on its own.
A few months later, the British Cabinet sent a fact-finding mission to Prague
under Lord Runciman to explore possible means of conciliation. The practical
consequence of that mission was to advertise Great Britain’s reluctance to
defend Czechoslovakia. The facts were already well known; any conceivable
conciliation would have required some dismemberment of Czechoslovakia.
Munich, therefore, was not a surrender but a state of mind and the nearly
inevitable outgrowth of the democracies’ effort to sustain a geopolitically flawed
settlement with rhetoric about collective security and self-determination.
Even America, the country most identified with the creation of
Czechoslovakia, dissociated itself from the crisis at an early stage. In September,
President Roosevelt suggested holding a negotiation on some neutral ground.37
Yet, if American embassies abroad were reporting accurately, Roosevelt could
have had no illusion about the attitudes which France, and even more so Great
Britain, would bring to any such conference. Indeed, Roosevelt reinforced these
attitudes by making the statement that “the Government of the United States…
will assume no obligations in the conduct of the present negotiations.”38
The situation was as if made to order for Hitler’s talent in waging
psychological warfare. Throughout the summer, he worked to magnify hysteria
about an imminent war without, in fact, making any specific threat. Finally, after
Hitler had engaged in a vicious personal attack on the Czech leadership at the
annual Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg in early September 1938, Chamberlain’s
nerves snapped. Though no formal demands had been made and no real
diplomatic exchanges had taken place, Chamberlain decided to end the tension
on September 15 by visiting Hitler. Hitler showed his disdain by choosing
Berchtesgaden as the meeting place—the location in Germany farthest from
London and the least accessible. In those days, traveling from London to
Berchtesgaden required an airplane trip of five hours, in what turned out to be
Chamberlain’s first flight, at the age of sixty-nine.
After enduring several hours of Hitler’s ranting about the alleged mistreatment
of the Sudeten Germans, Chamberlain agreed to dismember Czechoslovakia. All
Czechoslovak districts with populations that were more than 50-percent German
were to be returned to Germany. The details were to be worked out at a second
meeting in a few days’ time, at Bad Godesberg, in the Rhineland. It was
symptomatic of Hitler’s negotiating style that he termed this subsequent locale a
“concession”; though much closer to London than the first site, it was still well
within Germany. In the interval, Chamberlain “persuaded” the Czechoslovak
government to accept his proposal—“sadly” so, in the words of the Czech
leaders.39
At Bad Godesberg on September 22, Hitler raised the ante and made it clear
that he sought the abject humiliation of Czechoslovakia. He would not agree to
the time-consuming procedure of district-by-district plebiscites and frontier
demarcations, demanding instead the immediate evacuation of the entire Sudeten
territory, the process to start on September 26—four days later—to be completed
in no more than forty-eight hours. Czech military installations were to be left
intact for the German armed forces. To weaken the rump state even further,
Hitler demanded border rectifications for Hungary and Poland on behalf of their
own minorities. When Chamberlain objected to being presented with an
ultimatum, Hitler snidely pointed to the word “memorandum” typed on top of
his presentation. After hours of acrimonious argument, Hitler made another
“concession”: he would give Czechoslovakia until 2:00 P.M. on September 28 to
reply, and until October 1 to begin withdrawing from the Sudeten territory.
Chamberlain could not bring himself to inflict such a total humiliation on
Czechoslovakia, and French Prime Minister Daladier drew the line even more
adamantly. For some days, war seemed imminent. Trenches were being dug in
British parks. This was the period in which Chamberlain made the melancholy
comment that Great Britain was being asked to go to war for a faraway country
about which it knew nothing—this from the leader of a country which had
fought for centuries on the approaches to India without blinking.
But what was the casus belli? Great Britain had already accepted the principle
of Czechoslovak dismemberment along with self-determination for the Sudeten
Germans. Great Britain and France were approaching the decision to go to war
not in order to sustain an ally but over the few weeks’ difference in the rate at
which it would be dismantled and a few territorial adjustments which were
marginal compared to what had already been conceded. Perhaps it was just as
well that Mussolini took everybody off the hook right before the deadline by
proposing that a conference already being planned between the foreign ministers
of Italy and Germany be expanded to include the heads of government of France
(Daladier), Great Britain (Chamberlain), Germany (Hitler), and Italy
(Mussolini).
The four leaders met on September 29 in Munich, the birthplace of the Nazi
Party, the sort of symbolism victors reserve for themselves. Little time was spent
on negotiations: Chamberlain and Daladier made a halfhearted attempt to return
to their original proposal; Mussolini produced a paper containing Hitler’s Bad
Godesberg proposal; Hitler defined the issues in the form of a sarcastic
ultimatum. Since his deadline of October 1 had caused him to be accused of
proceeding in an atmosphere of violence, he said that the task at hand was “to
absolve the action of such a character.”40 In other words, the sole purpose of the
conference was to accept Hitler’s Bad Godesberg program peacefully before he
went to war to impose it.
Chamberlain and Daladier’s conduct over the previous months gave them no
real choice but to accept Mussolini’s draft. Czech representatives were left
languishing in anterooms while their country was being dismembered. The
Soviet Union was not invited at all. Great Britain and France assuaged their
guilty consciences by offering to guarantee the remaining fragment of disarmed
Czechoslovakia—a preposterous gesture coming from nations which had refused
to honor the guarantee of an intact, well-armed fellow democracy. It goes
without saying that the guarantee was never implemented.
Munich has entered our vocabulary as a specific aberration—the penalty of
yielding to blackmail. Munich, however, was not a single act but the culmination
of an attitude which began in the 1920s and accelerated with each new
concession. For over a decade, Germany had been throwing off the restrictions
of Versailles one by one: the Weimar Republic had rid Germany of reparations,
of the InterAllied Military Control Commission, and of Allied occupation of the
Rhineland. Hitler had denounced the restrictions on German armaments, the
prohibition against conscription, and the demilitarization provisions of Locarno.
Even in the 1920s, Germany had never accepted the Eastern frontiers, and the
Allies had never insisted that it accept them. Finally, as so often happens,
decisions cumulatively developed their own momentum.
By conceding that the Versailles settlement was iniquitous, the victors eroded
the psychological basis for defending it. The victors of the Napoleonic Wars had
made a generous peace, but they had also organized the Quadruple Alliance in
order to leave no ambiguity about their determination to defend it. The victors of
World War I had made a punitive peace and, after having themselves created the
maximum incentive for revisionism, cooperated in dismantling their own
settlement.
For two decades, the balance of power had been alternately rejected and
ridiculed; the leaders of the democracies told their peoples that, henceforth, the
world order would be based on a higher morality. Then, when the challenge to
the new world order finally came, the democracies—Great Britain with
conviction, France with doubt tinged by despair—had no recourse but to drain
the cup of conciliation to demonstrate to their peoples that Hitler could not in
fact be appeased.
This explains why the Munich agreement was greeted with such wild acclaim
by the vast majority of its contemporaries. Franklin Roosevelt was among those
congratulating Chamberlain: “Good man,” he said.41 The leaders of the British
Commonwealth were more effusive. The Prime Minister of Canada wrote:
May I convey to you the warm congratulations of the Canadian people, and with them, an expression
of their gratitude, which is felt from one end of the dominion to the other. My colleagues and
Government join with me in unbounded admiration at the service you have rendered mankind.42
Not to be outdone, the Australian Prime Minister said:
Colleagues and I desire to express our warmest congratulations at the outcome of the negotiations at
Munich. Australians in common with all other peoples of the British empire owe a deep debt of
gratitude to you for your unceasing efforts to preserve the peace.43
Strangely enough, all of the eyewitnesses to the Munich Conference concurred
that, far from triumphant, Hitler was morose. He had wanted war, which he
regarded as indispensable to the realization of his ambitions. He probably needed
it for psychological reasons as well; nearly all of his public utterances, which he
viewed as the most vital aspect of his public life, related in one way or another to
his wartime experiences. Even though Hitler’s generals strongly opposed war—
to the point of fitfully planning to overthrow him should he make a final decision
to attack—Hitler left Munich with the sense of having been cheated. And, by his
own inverted reasoning, he may well have been right. For had he managed to
contrive a war over Czechoslovakia, it is doubtful that the democracies could
have sustained the sacrifices necessary to win it. The issue was too incompatible
with the principle of self-determination, and public opinion was not sufficiently
prepared for the almost certain initial reverses of such a war.
Paradoxically, Munich turned into the psychological end of the line for
Hitler’s strategy. Until then, he had always been able to appeal to the
democracies’ sense of guilt about the inequities of Versailles; afterward, his only
weapon was brute force, and there was a limit to how much blackmail even
those most afraid of war would accept before taking a stand.
This was especially true of Great Britain. By his conduct at Bad Godesberg
and at Munich, Hitler used up the last reserves of British goodwill. Despite his
fatuous statement of having brought “peace for our time,” when he returned to
London, Chamberlain was determined never to be blackmailed again, and
launched a major rearmament program.
In fact, Chamberlain’s conduct in the Munich crisis was more complex than
posterity has depicted it. Wildly popular in the wake of Munich, he was ever
after associated with surrender. The democratic public is unforgiving in the face
of debacles, even when these result from carrying out its own immediate wishes.
Chamberlain’s reputation collapsed once it became clear that he had not
achieved “peace for our time.” Hitler soon found another pretext for war, and by
then Chamberlain could not even garner credit for having managed the process
by which Great Britain was able to weather the storm as a united people and
with a restored air force.
In retrospect, it is easy to disparage the often naïve pronouncements of the
appeasers. Yet most of them were decent men earnestly seeking to implement the
new dispensation contrived by Wilsonian idealism under the cloud of general
disillusionment with traditional European diplomacy, and the pervasive sense of
spiritual and physical exhaustion. In no previous period could a British prime
minister have justified an agreement, in the way Chamberlain had Munich—as a
“removal of those suspicions and those animosities which have so long poisoned
the air”44—as if foreign policy belonged to a branch of psychology. Still, these
views had all sprung from an idealistic effort to transcend the legacies of
Realpolitik and European history by appealing to reason and justice.
It did not take Hitler long to shatter the illusions of the appeasers, thereby
hastening his own ultimate downfall. In March 1939, less than six months after
Munich, Hitler occupied the rump of Czechoslovakia. The Czech portion
became a German protectorate; Slovakia was designated a technically
independent state, if a German satellite. Though Great Britain and France had
offered to guarantee Czechoslovakia at Munich, that pledge was never
formalized, nor could have been.
The destruction of Czechoslovakia made no geopolitical sense whatsoever; it
showed that Hitler was beyond rational calculation and bent on war. Deprived of
its defenses and of its French and Soviet alliances, Czechoslovakia was bound to
slip into the German orbit, and Eastern Europe was certain to adjust to the new
power realities. The Soviet Union had just purged its entire political and military
leadership and would not be a factor for some time. All Hitler had to do was
wait, because, with France in effect neutralized, Germany would eventually
emerge as the dominant power in Eastern Europe. Waiting, of course, was what
Hitler was emotionally least capable of doing.
The British and French reaction (spearheaded by London) of drawing the line
made equally little sense in terms of traditional power politics. The seizure of
Prague changed neither the balance of power nor the foreseeable course of
events. But in terms of the Versailles principles, the occupation of
Czechoslovakia marked a watershed because it demonstrated that Hitler sought
the domination of Europe and not self-determination or equality.
Hitler’s blunder was not so much to have violated historic principles of
equilibrium as to have offended the moral premises of British postwar foreign
policy. His transgression was to incorporate non-German populations into the
Reich, thereby violating the principle of self-determination, on behalf of which
all his previous unilateral exactions had been tolerated. Great Britain’s patience
was neither inexhaustible nor the result of a weak national character; and Hitler
had, at last, fulfilled the British public’s moral definition of aggression, if not yet
the British government’s. After a few days of hesitation, Chamberlain moved his
policy into line with British public opinion. From that point on, Great Britain
would resist Hitler not in order to comply with historic theories of equilibrium,
but, quite simply, because Hitler could no longer be trusted.
Ironically, the Wilsonian approach to international relations, which had
facilitated Hitler’s advances beyond what any previous European system would
have considered acceptable, after a certain point also caused Great Britain to
draw the line more rigorously than it would have in a world based on Realpolitik
If Wilsonianism had prevented earlier resistance to Hitler, it also laid the
foundation for implacable opposition to him once its moral criteria had been
unambiguously violated.
When Hitler laid claim to Danzig in 1939 and sought modification of the
Polish Corridor, the issues at hand were essentially no different from those of the
year before. Danzig was a thoroughly German town, and its free-city status flew
as much in the face of the principle of self-determination as had adjudication of
the Sudeten territory to Czechoslovakia. Though the population of the Polish
Corridor was more mixed, some adjustment of borders that was more responsive
to the principle of self-determination was quite possible—at least theoretically.
Yet what had changed beyond Hitler’s comprehension was that, once he had
crossed the line of what was morally tolerable, the same moral perfectionism
which had formerly generated pliability in the democracies transformed itself
into unprecedented intransigence. After Germany occupied Czechoslovakia,
British public opinion would tolerate no further concessions; from then on, the
outbreak of the Second World War was only a matter of time—unless Hitler
remained quiescent, which, for him, proved psychologically impossible.
Before that momentous event could come to pass, however, the international
system received one more shock—this time from the other great revisionist
power it had ignored throughout most of the turbulent 1930s—Stalin’s Soviet
Union.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Stalin’s Bazaar
If ideology necessarily determined foreign policy, Hitler and Stalin would never
have joined hands any more than Richelieu and the Sultan of Turkey would have
three centuries earlier. But common geopolitical interest is a powerful bond, and
it was pushing the old enemies, Hitler and Stalin, inexorably together.
When it happened, the democracies were incredulous; their stunned surprise
indicated that they had no better understanding of Stalin’s mentality than they
had of Hitler’s. Stalin’s career, like Hitler’s, had been forged on the fringes of
society, though it took him much longer to reach absolute power. Hitler’s
reliance on demagogic brilliance caused him to stake everything on a single
throw of the dice. Stalin prevailed by undermining his rivals from deep within
the communist bureaucracy, where the other contenders for power had ignored
him because they did not at first view the sinister figure from Georgia as a
serious rival. Hitler succeeded by overwhelming his associates with elemental
single-mindedness; Stalin accrued power by dint of implacable anonymity.
Hitler transposed his Bohemian work habits and mercurial personality into
decision-making, endowing his government with a fitful and occasionally
dilettantish quality. Stalin incorporated the rigorous catechisms of his early
religious training into the brutal exegeses of the Bolshevik world view, and
transformed ideology into an instrument of political control. Hitler thrived on the
succor of the adoration of the masses. Stalin was far too paranoid to rely on so
personal an approach. He craved ultimate victory far more than immediate
approbation, and preferred to achieve it by destroying, one by one, all of his
potential rivals.
Hitler’s ambitions needed to be fulfilled within his own lifetime; in his
statements, he represented only himself. Stalin was equally megalomaniacal but
viewed himself as a servant of historical truth. Unlike Hitler, Stalin had
incredible patience. Unlike the leaders of the democracies, he was at all times
prepared to undertake a meticulous study of power relationships. Precisely
because he was so convinced that his ideology embodied historical truth, Stalin
ruthlessly pursued the Soviet national interest unencumbered by what he
considered hypocritical moral baggage or sentimental attachments.
Stalin was indeed a monster; but in the conduct of international relations, he
was the supreme realist—patient, shrewd, and implacable, the Richelieu of his
period. Without knowing it, the Western democracies were tempting fate by
counting on an irreconcilable ideological conflict between Stalin and Hitler, by
teasing Stalin with a French pact that foreswore military cooperation, by
excluding the Soviet Union from the Munich Conference, and by rather
ambivalently entering into military talks with Stalin only when it was already too
late to prevent him from making a pact with Hitler. The leaders of the
democracies confused Stalin’s ponderous, mildly theological speeches with
rigidity of both thought and policy. Yet Stalin’s rigidity extended only to
communist ideology. His communist convictions enabled him to be
extraordinarily flexible in his tactics.
Beyond these psychological aspects, Stalin’s character had a philosophical
core which made him nearly incomprehensible to Western leaders. As an old
Bolshevik, he had suffered imprisonment, exile, and privation on behalf of his
convictions for decades before coming to power. Priding themselves on having a
superior insight into the dynamics of history, the Bolsheviks saw their role as
helping along the objective historical process. In their view, the difference
between themselves and noncommunists was akin to the difference between
scientists and laymen. In analyzing physical phenomena, the scientist does not
actually bring them about; his understanding of why they occur enables him
occasionally to manipulate the process, though never according to anything but
the phenomena’s own inherent laws. In the same spirit, the Bolsheviks thought
of themselves as scientists of history—helping to make its dynamics apparent,
perhaps even to speed them up, but never to change their immutable direction.
Communist leaders presented themselves as implacable, beyond compassion,
and as unswerving from their historical task as they were unswayable by
conventional arguments, especially when these came from nonbelievers. The
communists felt they had an edge in the conduct of diplomacy because they
thought they understood their interlocutors better than they could ever
understand themselves. In the communist mind, concessions could only be
made, if at all, to “objective reality,” never to the persuasiveness of the diplomats
with whom they were negotiating. Diplomacy thus belonged to the process by
which the existing order would eventually be overturned; whether it would be
overthrown by a diplomacy of peaceful coexistence or by military conflict
depended on the assessment of the relation of forces.
One principle in Stalin’s universe of inhuman and coldblooded calculation
was, however, immutable: nothing could justify fighting hopeless battles for
dubious causes. Philosophically, the ideological conflict with Nazi Germany was
part of a general conflict with the capitalists that, as far as Stalin was concerned,
embraced France and Great Britain. Which country ended up bearing the brunt
of Soviet hostility depended entirely on which one Moscow considered the
greater threat at any given moment.
Morally, Stalin did not distinguish among the various capitalist states. His true
opinion of the countries extolling the virtues of universal peace was evident in
his reaction to the signing of the Kellogg-Briand Pact in 1928:
They talk about pacifism; they speak about peace among European states. Briand and [Austen]
Chamberlain are embracing each other…. All this is nonsense. From European history we know that
every time that treaties envisaging a new arrangement of forces for new wars have been signed, these
treaties have been called treaties of peace… [although] they were signed for the purpose of depicting
new elements of the coming war.1
Stalin’s ultimate nightmare, of course, was a coalition of all the capitalist
countries attacking the Soviet Union simultaneously. In 1927, Stalin described
Soviet strategy in the same way Lenin had a decade earlier: “…a great deal…
depends on whether we shall succeed in deferring the inevitable war with the
capitalist world… until the time… when the capitalists start fighting each
other….”2 To encourage this prospect, the Soviet Union had concluded the
Rapallo agreement with Germany in 1922 and the neutrality treaty of Berlin in
1926, which it renewed in 1931, explicitly promising to stay out of a capitalist
war.
As far as Stalin was concerned, Hitler’s vituperative anticommunism did not
constitute an insuperable obstacle to good relations with Germany. When Hitler
came to power, Stalin wasted no time making conciliatory gestures. “[W]e are
far from being enthusiastic about the fascist regime in Germany,” Stalin stated at
the Seventeenth Party Congress in January 1934. “[I]t is not a question of
fascism here, if only for the reason that fascism in Italy, for example, has not
prevented the USSR from establishing the best relations with that country….
Our orientation in the past and our orientation at the present time is towards the
USSR, and the USSR alone. And if the interests of the USSR demand
rapprochement with one country or another which is not interested in disturbing
peace, we adopt this course without hesitation.”3
Stalin, the great ideologue, was in fact putting his ideology in the service of
Realpolitik. Richelieu or Bismarck would have had no difficulty understanding
his strategy. It was the statesmen representing the democracies who were
wearing ideological blinkers; having rejected power politics, they thought that
the precondition to good relations among nations was a general belief in the
premises of collective security, and that ideological hostility would preclude any
possibility of practical cooperation between the fascists and the communists.
The democracies were wrong on both counts. In due course, Stalin did move
into the anti-Hitler camp, but only very reluctantly and after his overtures to
Nazi Germany had been rebuffed. Convinced at last that Hitler’s anti-Bolshevik
rhetoric might well be serious, Stalin set about constructing the widest possible
coalition to contain it. His new strategy emerged at the Seventh (and last)
Congress of the Communist International in July and August 1935.4 Calling for a
united front of all peace-loving peoples, it signaled the abandonment of the
communist tactics of the 1920s, when, in an effort to paralyze European
parliamentary institutions, Communist Parties had consistently voted with
antidemocratic groups, including the fascists.
The principal spokesman of the new Soviet foreign policy was Maxim
Litvinov, who had been appointed Foreign Minister in order to play just this role.
Urbane, fluent in English, and Jewish, he was of bourgeois origin and was
married to the daughter of a British historian. His formal credentials were better
suited to a class enemy than a man destined for a career in Soviet diplomacy.
Under Litvinov’s stewardship, the Soviet Union joined the League of Nations,
and became one of the most vocal proponents of collective security. Stalin was
quite prepared to resort to Wilsonian rhetoric in order to gain insurance against
the prospect that Hitler might actually carry out what he had written in Mein
Kampf and make the Soviet Union his principal target. As the political scientist
Robert Legvold has pointed out, Stalin’s purpose was to extract maximum
assistance from the capitalist world, not to make peace with it.5
A deep sense of mutual distrust pervaded the relations between the
democracies and the Soviet Union. Stalin signed pacts with France in 1935 and
with Czechoslovakia the following year. But the French leaders of the 1930s
took the opposite course and refused military staff talks. Inevitably, Stalin
interpreted this as an invitation to Hitler to attack the Soviet Union first. To
reinsure himself, Stalin made Soviet help to Czechoslovakia dependent on the
prior fulfillment of French obligations to Czechoslovakia. This, of course, gave
Stalin the option of leaving the imperialists to fight it out among themselves. The
Franco-Soviet treaty was hardly a relationship made in heaven.
France’s willingness to create political ties with the Soviet Union while
simultaneously rejecting a military alliance with it illustrates the never-never
land into which the foreign policy of the democracies had drifted between the
wars. The democracies valued the rhetoric of collective security but recoiled
from giving it an operational content. World War I should have taught Great
Britain and France that, even in alliance, fighting Germany by themselves was a
precarious enterprise. After all, Germany had nearly prevailed in 1918, despite
the fact that America had joined the Allies. To consider fighting Germany
without Soviet or American assistance combined the Maginot Line mentality
with a gross overestimation of their strength.
Only extremely wishful thinking on the part of the democracies’ leaders could
have led to the widespread belief that Stalin—the original Bolshevik and a
staunch believer in socalled objective, material factors—could have converted to
the juridical and moral doctrine of collective security. For Stalin and his
colleagues had reasons other than ideology to be unenthusiastic about the
established international order. After all, the Soviet frontiers with Poland had
been imposed by force and Romania had seized Bessarabia, which the Soviets
considered their own.
Nor did the potential German victims in Eastern Europe desire Soviet help.
The combination of the Versailles settlement and the Russian Revolution had
created an insoluble problem for any system of collective security in Eastern
Europe: without the Soviet Union, it could not work militarily; with it, it could
not work politically.
Western diplomacy did little to ease Stalin’s paranoia about a capitalist antiSoviet cabal. The Soviet Union was not consulted in the diplomacy surrounding
the abrogation of the Locarno Pact, and was excluded altogether from the
Munich Conference. It was brought into discussions for a security system in
Eastern Europe only grudgingly and quite late, after the occupation of
Czechoslovakia in 1939.
Nevertheless, it is a misreading of Stalin’s psychology to blame the HitlerStalin Pact largely on Western policy. Stalin’s paranoia was amply demonstrated
by his elimination of all potential domestic rivals and the murder or deportation
of millions more who opposed him only in his fantasies. In spite of that, when it
came to foreign policy, Stalin proved himself the ultimate cold calculator and
took great pride in not letting himself be provoked into any rash moves,
especially by capitalist leaders whose understanding of the correlation of forces
he rated far below his own.
One can only speculate what Stalin might have intended at the time of
Munich. Yet his least likely course at the moment when he was convulsing his
country with purge after purge would have been automatic and suicidal
implementation of a mutual assistance treaty. Since the treaty with
Czechoslovakia committed the Soviet Union only after France was at war, it left
Stalin with a number of options. For instance, he could demand passage through
Romania and Poland and use the nearly certain refusal of those countries as an
alibi to await the outcome of battles in Central and Western Europe. Or else,
depending on his assessment of the consequences, he could recapture the
Russian territories lost to Poland and Romania in the aftermath of the Russian
Revolution, much as he did a year later. The most unlikely outcome was one in
which the Soviet Union would mount the barricades as the last defender of the
Versailles territorial settlement in the name of collective security.
No doubt, Munich confirmed Stalin’s suspicions about the democracies. Yet
nothing could fundamentally deflect him from seeking to fulfill, at nearly any
cost, what he considered his Bolshevik duty—pitting the capitalists against each
other and keeping the Soviet Union from becoming a victim of their wars. The
effect of Munich, therefore, was primarily to alter Stalin’s tactics. For now he
opened up a bazaar for bids on a Soviet pact—one which the democracies had no
hope of winning if Hitler was prepared to make a serious offer. When, on
October 4, 1938, the French Ambassador called on the Soviet Foreign Ministry
to explain the Munich agreement, he was greeted by Vladimir Potemkin, the
Deputy Commissar for Foreign Affairs, with these menacing words: “My poor
friend, what have you done? For us, I see no other outcome than a fourth
partition of Poland.”6
The epigram was a glimpse into Stalin’s icy approach to foreign policy. After
Munich, Poland was certain to become Germany’s next target. Since Stalin
wanted neither to confront the German army at the existing Soviet frontier nor to
fight Hitler, a fourth partition of Poland was the only alternative (indeed, similar
reasoning had led Catherine the Great to promote the first partition of Poland
with Prussia and Austria in 1772). The fact that Stalin waited an entire year for
Hitler to make the first move attested to the steely nerves with which he
conducted his foreign policy.
With his objective firmly in place, Stalin next moved swiftly to withdraw the
Soviet Union from the front line. On January 27, 1939, the London News
Chronicle published an article by its diplomatic correspondent (known to be
close to Moscow’s ambassador, Ivan Maisky) outlining a possible deal between
the Soviet Union and Germany. The author repeated Stalin’s standard thesis that
there was no significant difference between the Western democracies and the
fascist dictators and used it to release the Soviet Union from any automatic
commitment to collective security:
At present, the Soviet government evidently has no intention of giving any help to Great Britain and
France if the latter come into conflict with Germany and Italy…. From the point of view of the
Soviet government, there is no great difference between the positions of the British and French
governments on the one hand and the German and Italian on the other, which would justify serious
sacrifices in the defence of Western democracy.7
Since the Soviet Union saw no need to choose between the various capitalists on
the basis of ideology, disagreements between Moscow and Berlin could be
solved on a practical basis. Lest the point be missed, Stalin took the
unprecedented step of having the article reprinted verbatim in Pravda, the
official Communist Party newspaper.
On March 10, 1939—five days before Hitler occupied Prague—Stalin stepped
forward with his own authoritative statement of Moscow’s new strategy. The
occasion was the Eighteenth Party Congress, the first such meeting held since
Stalin’s endorsement of collective security and “united fronts” five years earlier.
The delegates’ feelings must have been dominated by relief at still being alive,
for the purges had decimated their ranks: only thirty-five of the 2,000 delegates
from five years before were now in attendance; 1,100 of the remainder had been
arrested for counterrevolutionary activities; ninety-eight of the 131 members of
the Central Committee had been liquidated, as had been three out of five
marshals of the Red Army, all eleven deputy commissars for defense, all military
district commanders, and seventy-five out of the eighty members of the Supreme
Military Council.8 The Eighteenth Party Congress was hardly a celebration of
continuity. Its attendees were vastly more concerned with the requirements of
their own personal survival than with the arcane subtleties of foreign policy.
As had been the case in 1934, Stalin’s basic theme before this terrified
audience was the peaceful intentions of the Soviet Union in a hostile
international environment. His conclusions, however, marked a radical break
from the collective security concept of the previous Party Congress. For, in
effect, Stalin declared Soviet neutrality in the conflict among the capitalists:
The foreign policy of the Soviet Union is clear and explicit. We stand for peace and the strengthening
of business relations with all countries. That is our position; and we shall adhere to this position as
long as these countries maintain like relations with the Soviet Union and as long as they make no
attempt to trespass on the interests of our country.9
To make certain that the obtuse capitalist leaders did not miss his point, Stalin
repeated almost verbatim the central argument of the News Chronicle article:
that, since the democracies and Germany had similar social structures, the
differences between Germany and the Soviet Union were no more
insurmountable than the differences between any other capitalist country and the
Soviet Union. Summing up, he voiced his determination to retain freedom of
action and to sell Moscow’s goodwill in any impending war to the highest
bidder. In an ominous phrase, Stalin vowed “[t]o be cautious and not allow our
country to be drawn into conflicts by warmongers who are accustomed to have
others pull the chestnuts out of the fire for them.”10 In effect, Stalin was inviting
Nazi Germany to make a bid.
Stalin’s new policy differed from the old primarily in terms of emphasis. Even
in the heyday of his support for collective security and “united fronts,” Stalin
had always hedged Soviet commitments in a way that permitted him to retain the
option of making a separate deal after the war had begun. But now, in the spring
of 1939, when the remaining fragment of Czechoslovakia had not yet been
occupied by Germany, Stalin was going one step further. He began maneuvering
for the opportunity to make a separate deal before the war. No one should have
complained that Stalin had kept his intentions secret; the shock of the
democracies was due to their inability to understand that Stalin, the passionate
revolutionary, was above all a coldblooded strategist.
After the occupation of Prague, Great Britain abandoned its policy of
appeasement toward Germany. The British Cabinet now exaggerated the
imminence of a Nazi threat to the same degree to which it had previously
underestimated it. It was convinced that Hitler would immediately follow the
destruction of Czechoslovakia with another assault—some thought on Belgium,
others on Poland. In late March 1939, rumor had it that the target was Romania,
which did not even share a border with Germany. Yet it would have been highly
uncharacteristic of Hitler to attack a second, unrelated, target quite so soon.
More typically, his tactic was to allow the impact of one coup to demoralize his
next intended victim before striking again. At any rate, we know in retrospect
that Great Britain had far more time to plan its strategy than its leaders believed.
Moreover, had the British Cabinet carefully analyzed Stalin’s pronouncements at
the Eighteenth Party Congress, it would have realized that, the more eagerly
Great Britain organized resistance to Hitler, the more aloof Stalin was likely to
be in order to magnify his leverage vis-à-vis both sides.
The British Cabinet now faced a fundamental strategic choice, though there is
no evidence that it was aware of it. In resisting Hitler, it had to decide whether its
approach would be based on constructing a system of collective security or a
traditional alliance. If it chose the former, the widest group of nations would be
invited to join the anti-Nazi resistance; if it chose the latter, Britain would have
to make compromises—to harmonize its interests with those of potential allies,
like the Soviet Union.
The Cabinet opted for collective security. On March 17, notes were sent to
Greece, Yugoslavia, France, Turkey, Poland, and the Soviet Union inquiring how
they would respond to the supposed threat to Romania—the premise being that
they must all share the same interests and represent a single attitude. Britain
suddenly seemed to be offering what it had withheld since 1918—a territorial
guarantee for all of Eastern Europe.
The responses of the various nations once again demonstrated the essential
weakness of the doctrine of collective security—the assumption that all nations,
and at a minimum all the potential victims, have the same interest in resisting
aggression. Every Eastern European nation presented its own problems as a
special case and emphasized national, not collective, concerns. Greece made its
reaction dependent on Yugoslavia’s; Yugoslavia inquired as to Great Britain’s
intentions—bringing matters back to their starting point. Poland indicated that it
was not prepared to take sides between Great Britain and Germany, or to engage
itself in the defense of Romania. Poland and Romania would not agree to Soviet
participation in the defense of their countries. And the response of the Soviet
Union was to propose a conference in Bucharest of all the countries to which the
British inquiry had been addressed.
This was a clever maneuver. If the conference took place, it would establish
the principle of Soviet participation in the defense of countries that were as
afraid of Moscow as they were of Berlin; if its initiative was rejected, the
Kremlin would have an excuse to stay aloof while pursuing its preferred option
of exploring accommodation with Germany. Moscow was in effect asking the
countries of Eastern Europe to identify Germany as the principal threat to their
existence, and to challenge it before Moscow had clarified its intentions. Since
no Eastern European country was prepared to do this, the Bucharest conference
never came about.
The unenthusiastic responses caused Neville Chamberlain to pursue other
arrangements. On March 20, he suggested a declaration of intent by Great
Britain, France, Poland, and the Soviet Union to consult with each other in the
event of any threat to the independence of any European state, “with a view to
taking common action.” A revival of the Triple Entente of pre-World War I, the
proposal said nothing about either the military strategy that would be
implemented should deterrence fail or the prospects for cooperation between
Poland and the Soviet Union, which was simply taken for granted.
For its part, Poland, whose romantic overestimation of its military capacities
Great Britain seemed to share, refused joint action with the Soviet Union, facing
Great Britain with a choice between Poland and the Soviet Union. If it
guaranteed Poland, Stalin’s incentive to participate in the common defense
would decline. Since Poland was situated between Germany and the Soviet
Union, Great Britain would be committed to go to war before Stalin needed to
make any decision. On the other hand, if Great Britain concentrated on a Soviet
pact, Stalin was sure to demand his pound of flesh for helping the Poles by
pushing the Soviet border westward, toward the Curzon Line.
Spurred on by public outrage and convinced that retreat would further weaken
Great Britain’s position, the British Cabinet refused to sacrifice any more
countries, whatever the dictates of geopolitics. At the same time, British leaders
suffered from the misapprehension that Poland was somehow militarily stronger
than the Soviet Union, and that the Red Army had no offensive value—a
plausible enough assessment in light of the massive purges of Soviet military
leaders that had just taken place. Above all, the British leaders deeply distrusted
the Soviet Union. “I must confess,” Chamberlain wrote, “to the very most
profound distrust of Russia. I have no belief whatever in her ability to maintain
an effective offensive, even if she wanted to. And I distrust her motives, which
seem to me to have little connection with our ideas of liberty, and to be
concerned only with getting everyone else by the ears.”11
Believing itself to be under a severe time constraint, Great Britain took the
plunge and announced the kind of peacetime Continental guarantee it had
consistently rejected since the Treaty of Versailles. Worried about reports of an
imminent German attack on Poland, Chamberlain did not even pause to
negotiate a bilateral alliance with Poland. Instead, he drafted a unilateral
guarantee to Poland with his own hand on March 30, 1939, and presented it to
Parliament the next day. The guarantee was meant to be a stopgap to deter Nazi
aggression, a threat which turned out to be based on false information. The
guarantee was to be followed by a more leisurely attempt to create a broad
system of collective security. Soon thereafter, unilateral guarantees based on the
same reasoning were extended to Greece and Romania.
Driven by moral outrage and strategic confusion, Great Britain thus slid into
guarantees on behalf of countries which all of its postwar prime ministers had
insisted it could not, and would not, defend. The post-Versailles realities of
Eastern Europe had grown so remote to the British experience that the Cabinet
did not even realize it had made a choice which would multiply Stalin’s options
toward Germany and ease his withdrawal from the proposed common front.
Great Britain’s leaders took Stalin’s participation in their strategy so much for
granted that they believed they could control both its timing and scope. Foreign
Secretary Lord Halifax urged that the Soviet Union be held in reserve and
“invited to lend a hand in certain circumstances in the most convenient form.”12
What Halifax had specifically in mind was supplying munitions, not moving
Soviet troops to beyond their border. He did not explain what incentive the
Soviet Union might have to play so subsidiary a role.
In fact the British guarantee to Poland and Romania removed whatever
incentive the Soviets might have had to enter into a serious negotiation about an
alliance with the Western democracies. For one thing, it guaranteed all the
borders of the Soviet Union’s European neighbors except for the Baltic States,
and, at least on paper, thwarted Soviet ambitions as much as it did Germany’s.
(The fact that Great Britain could have been oblivious to this reality was a
measure of the degree to which the “united front of peace-loving countries” had
taken hold in the Western mind.) But, more important, the unilateral British
guarantees were a gift to Stalin because they provided him with the maximum he
would have asked for in any negotiation which started, as most negotiations do,
with an empty slate. If Hitler moved east, Stalin was now assured of Great
Britain’s commitment to go to war well before the Soviet frontier was reached.
Stalin thus garnered the benefit of a de facto alliance with Great Britain without
any need to reciprocate.
Great Britain’s guarantee to Poland was based on four assumptions, each of
which turned out to be wrong: that Poland was a significant military power,
perhaps more so than the Soviet Union; that France and Great Britain together
were strong enough to defeat Germany without the help of other allies; that the
Soviet Union had an interest in maintaining the status quo in Eastern Europe;
and that the ideological gulf between Germany and the Soviet Union was
ultimately so unbridgeable that the Soviet Union would join the anti-Hitler
coalition sooner or later.
Poland was heroic, but it was not a significant military power. Its task was
made all the less manageable because the French general staff misled Poland
about its actual intentions, implying that some sort of French offensive was in
prospect. The defensive strategy to which France was in fact committed would
oblige Poland to face the full fury of the German onslaught alone—a task which
Western leaders should have known was far beyond Poland’s capacities. At the
same time, Poland could not be induced to accept Soviet help, because its
leaders were convinced (correctly, as it turned out) that any “liberating” Soviet
army would turn into an army of occupation. And the democracies’ assessment
was that they could win a war against Germany by themselves even if Poland
were defeated.
The Soviets’ interest in preserving the status quo in Eastern Europe ended
with the Eighteenth Party Congress—if, indeed, it had ever really existed.
Crucially, Stalin did in fact have the option of turning to Hitler and, after the
British guarantee to Poland, could play his Nazi card with considerable safety.
His task was eased because the Western democracies refused to grasp his
strategy—which would have been quite clear to Richelieu, Metternich,
Palmerston, or Bismarck. Quite simply, it was to make certain that the Soviet
Union was always the last major power to commit itself, thereby achieving the
freedom of action for a bazaar in which either Soviet cooperation or Soviet
neutrality would be offered to the highest bidder.
Before the British guarantee to Poland, Stalin had had to be wary lest Soviet
overtures to Germany cause the democracies to wash their hands of Eastern
Europe, leaving him to face Hitler alone. After the guarantee, he had an
assurance not only that Great Britain would fight for his Western frontier but that
the war would start 600 miles to the west, on the German-Polish frontier.
Stalin had only two remaining concerns. First, he had to make certain that the
British guarantee to Poland was solid; second, he would have to find out whether
the German option really existed. Paradoxically, the more Great Britain
demonstrated its good faith with respect to Poland, which it was required to do
in order to deter Hitler, the more maneuvering room Stalin gained with respect to
Germany. Great Britain sought to preserve the Eastern European status quo.
Stalin aimed for the greatest range of choices and to overturn the Versailles
settlement. Chamberlain wanted to prevent war. Stalin, who felt war was
inevitable, wanted the benefits of war without participating in it.
Stalin decorously pirouetted between the two sides. But in the end, it was no
contest. Hitler alone was in a position to offer him the territorial gain in Eastern
Europe that he was after, and for this he was quite willing to pay the price of a
European war which spared the Soviet Union. On April 14, Great Britain
proposed a unilateral declaration by the Soviet Union that “in the event of any
act of aggression against any European neighbour of the Soviet Union, which
was resisted by the country concerned, the assistance of the Soviet government
would be available.”13 Stalin refused to put his head inside a noose and rejected
the one-sided and naive proposal. On April 17, he replied with a counteroffer in
three parts: an alliance among the Soviet Union, France, and Great Britain; a
military convention to give it effect; and a guarantee for all the countries
between the Baltic and the Black seas.
Stalin had to know that such a proposal would never be accepted. First of all,
the Eastern European countries did not want it; second, negotiating a detailed
military convention would have taken more time than was available; and, finally,
Great Britain had not been withholding an alliance from France for the past
decade and a half to give one now to a country it had deemed worthy of no more
important a role than as a supplier of munitions. “It cannot be pretended,” said
Chamberlain, “that such an alliance is necessary in order that the smaller
countries of Eastern Europe should be furnished with munitions.”14
Overcoming their reservations, the British leaders inched week by week
toward meeting Stalin’s terms while he continually raised the ante. In May,
Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s trusted confidant, had replaced Litvinov as Foreign
Minister, signifying that Stalin had personally taken charge of the negotiations
and that good personal relations between the negotiators were no longer a Soviet
priority. In his abrasively pedantic manner, Molotov demanded that all the
countries along the Soviet Union’s western border be guaranteed by both sides
and that they be specifically enumerated (ensuring a formal refusal from at least
some of them). He also insisted that the term “aggression” be expanded to cover
“indirect aggression,” defined as any concession to German threats, even if force
had not actually been used. Since the Soviet Union reserved for itself the
definition of what was meant by “yielding,” Stalin was also in effect demanding
an unlimited right of intervention in the domestic affairs of all the Soviet Union’s
European neighbors.
By July, Stalin had learned enough. He knew that the British leaders would
consent—however reluctantly—to an alliance on close to his terms. On July 23,
the Soviet and Western negotiators agreed on a draft treaty that was apparently
satisfactory to both sides. Stalin had now acquired a safety net for determining
exactly what Hitler had to offer.
Throughout the spring and summer, Stalin carefully signaled that he was ready
to entertain a German proposal. Hitler, however, was wary of making the first
move lest Stalin use it to extract better terms from Great Britain and France.
Stalin had the same fear in reverse. He too was reluctant to make the first move
because, if it became public, Great Britain might abandon its Eastern
commitments and oblige him to face Hitler alone. Nor was he in any hurry;
unlike Hitler, he faced no deadlines, and his nerves were strong. So Stalin
waited, raising Hitler’s anxieties.
On July 26, Hitler blinked. If he were to attack Poland before the autumn
rains, he needed to know by September 1 at the latest what Stalin intended to do.
Karl Schnurre, the head of a German team negotiating a new trade agreement
with the Soviet Union, was instructed to begin broaching political subjects.
Using mutual hostility toward the capitalist West as a bond, he assured his Soviet
counterpart that “there was no problem between these two countries from the
Baltic to the Black Sea or in the Far East that could not be solved.”15 Schnurre
offered to have these discussions continued at a high-level political meeting with
the Soviets.
Showing eagerness rarely speeds up negotiations. No experienced statesman
settles just because his interlocutor feels a sense of urgency; he is far more likely
to use such impatience to try to extract even better terms. In any case, Stalin was
not to be stampeded. Thus, it was not until mid-August that Molotov was
instructed to receive the German Ambassador, von der Schulenburg, with a list
of questions to determine precisely what Schnurre was offering. Pressure on the
Japanese not to threaten Siberia? A nonaggression treaty? A pact on the Baltic
States? A deal on Poland?
By this time, Hitler was in such a hurry that, although he hated doing so, he
was prepared to give way on every point. On August 11, he told the high
commissioner of Danzig:
Everything I undertake is directed against Russia. If the West is too stupid and too blind to
comprehend that, I will be forced to come to an understanding with the Russians, to smash the West,
and then after its defeat, to turn against the Soviet Union with my assembled forces.16
It was certainly an accurate statement of Hitler’s priorities: from Great Britain,
he wanted noninterference in Continental affairs, and from the Soviet Union, he
wanted Lebensraum, or living space. It was a measure of Stalin’s achievement
that he was about to reverse Hitler’s priorities, however temporarily.
In responding to Molotov’s questions, von der Schulenburg informed him that
Hitler was prepared to send his Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, to
Moscow immediately with full authority to settle all outstanding issues. Stalin
could not help noticing that Hitler was prepared to negotiate at a level Great
Britain had consistently evaded, for no British minister had seen fit to visit
Moscow during all the months of negotiation, even though some had ventured as
far east as Warsaw.
Unwilling to show his hand until he knew precisely what was being offered,
Stalin turned up the pressure on Hitler another notch. Molotov was instructed to
express appreciation for Ribbentrop’s enthusiasm but to say that an agreement in
principle was needed before the utility of a visit could be determined. Hitler was
invited to frame a precise proposal, including a secret protocol to deal with
specific territorial questions. Even the obtuse Ribbentrop must have understood
the purpose of Molotov’s request. Any leak of the proposal would be a German
draft; Stalin’s hands would remain clean, and failure of the negotiations could be
ascribed to a Soviet refusal to go along with German expansionism.
By now, Hitler’s nervousness had reached a fever pitch. For a decision to
strike at Poland had to be reached in a matter of days. On August 20, he wrote
directly to Stalin. The letter itself posed something of a challenge for German
protocol officers. Since Stalin’s only title was “General Secretary of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union” and he held no governmental position,
they could not decide how to address him. Finally, the letter was dispatched
simply to “M. Stalin, Moscow.” It stated: “I am convinced that the substance of
the supplementary protocol desired by the Soviet Union can be cleared in the
shortest possible time if a responsible German statesman can come to Moscow
himself to negotiate.”17
Stalin had won his gamble on keeping Soviet options open until the last
second. For Hitler was clearly about to offer him for free what, in any alliance
with Great Britain and France, he could only have gained after a bloody war
with Germany. On August 21, Stalin replied, expressing his hope “that the
German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact will mark a decisive turn for the better in the
political relations between our two countries….”18 Ribbentrop was invited to
come to Moscow forty-eight hours later, on August 23.
Ribbentrop had been in Moscow no more than an hour before he was ushered
into Stalin’s presence. The Soviet leader showed little interest in a nonaggression
pact and even less in the professions of friendship which Ribbentrop had
incorporated into his remarks. The focal point of his concern was the secret
protocol dividing up Eastern Europe. Ribbentrop proposed that Poland be
divided into spheres of influence along the 1914 border, the principal difference
being that Warsaw would remain on the German side. Whether some semblance
of Polish independence would be maintained or whether Germany and the Soviet
Union would annex all their conquests was left open. With respect to the Baltics,
Ribbentrop proposed that Finland and Estonia fall within the Russian sphere
(giving Stalin his long-desired buffer zone around Leningrad), that Lithuania go
to Germany, and that Latvia be partitioned. When Stalin demanded all of Latvia,
Ribbentrop telegraphed Hitler, who gave way—as he would with respect to
Stalin’s claim to take Bessarabia from Romania. An elated Ribbentrop returned
to Berlin, where a euphoric Hitler greeted him as “a second Bismarck.”19 A mere
three days had transpired between the time of Hitler’s initial message to Stalin
and the completion of a diplomatic revolution.
Afterward, there was the usual postmortem about who was responsible for this
shocking turn of events. Some blamed Great Britain’s grudging negotiating style.
The historian A. J. P. Taylor has shown that, in the exchanges between Great
Britain and the Soviet Union, the Soviets, rather uncharacteristically, responded
to British proposals much more quickly than the British did to Soviet messages.
From this fact Taylor concluded, in my view incorrectly, that the Kremlin was
more anxious for an alliance than London was.20 I believe it was much more a
case of Stalin’s being eager to keep Great Britain in play and not rattle it
prematurely—at least until he could determine Hitler’s intentions.
The British Cabinet obviously made a number of grave psychological errors.
Not only did no minister visit Moscow, but London delayed its agreement to
joint military planning until early August. Even then, an admiral was made the
head of the British delegation, though ground warfare was the principal, if not
the only, subject on Soviet minds. Moreover, the delegation traveled to the
Soviet Union by boat, taking five days to reach its destination, which did not
exactly denote a sense of urgency. Finally, however worthy the moral
considerations, Great Britain’s reluctance to guarantee the Baltic States was
bound to be interpreted by the paranoid leader in Moscow as an invitation to
Hitler to attack the Soviet Union, bypassing Poland.
Yet it was not Great Britain’s clumsy diplomatic conduct that had led to the
Nazi-Soviet Pact. The real problem was that Great Britain could not meet
Stalin’s terms without abandoning every principle it had stood for since the end
of the First World War. There was no point in drawing a line against the rape of
small countries by Germany if that implied having to grant the same privilege to
the Soviet Union. A more cynical British leadership might have drawn the line at
the Soviet border instead of Poland’s, thereby greatly improving Great Britain’s
bargaining position with the Soviet Union and giving Stalin a serious incentive
to negotiate about protecting Poland. To their moral credit, the democracies
could not bring themselves to consecrate another set of aggressions, not even on
behalf of their own security. Realpolitik would have dictated an analysis of the
strategic implications of Great Britain’s guarantee to Poland, whereas the
Versailles international order required that Great Britain’s course be sustained by
essentially moral and legal considerations. Stalin had a strategy but no
principles; the democracies defended principle without ever developing a
strategy.
Poland could not be defended with the French army inert behind the Maginot
Line, and the Soviet army waiting inside its own frontiers. In 1914, the nations
of Europe had gone to war because military and political planning had lost touch
with each other. As the general staffs had polished their plans, the political
leaders neither understood them nor had any political objectives commensurate
with the magnitude of the military effort being envisaged.
In 1939, military and political planning again lost touch, this time for the
exactly opposite reason. The Western powers had an eminently sensible and
moral political objective—to stop Hitler. But they were never able to develop a
military strategy to attain that goal. In 1914, strategists were too reckless; in
1939, they were too self-effacing. In 1914, the military of every country were
spoiling for war; in 1939, they had so many misgivings (even in Germany) that
they abdicated their judgment to the political leaders. In 1914, there had been a
strategy but no policy; in 1939, there was a policy but no strategy.
Russia played a decisive role in the outbreak of both wars. In 1914, Russia
had contributed to the start of the war by rigidly adhering to its alliance with
Serbia and to an inflexible mobilization schedule; in 1939, when Stalin relieved
Hitler of the fear of a two-front war, he must have known that he was making a
general war inevitable. In 1914, Russia had gone to war to preserve its honor; in
1939, it encouraged war to share in the spoils of Hitler’s conquests.
Germany, however, conducted itself in exactly the same manner prior to the
outbreak of both world wars—with impatience and a lack of perspective. In
1914, it had gone to war to break up an alliance which almost surely would not
have held together in the absence of German bullying; in 1939, it was unwilling
to wait for its inevitable evolution into the decisive nation of Europe. And that
would have required the precise opposite of Hitler’s strategy—a period of repose
to permit post-Munich geopolitical realities to sink in. In 1914, the German
Emperor’s emotional imbalance and lack of a clear concept of the national
interest had prevented him from waiting; in 1939, an ingenious psychotic
determined to wage war while still at the height of his physical powers swept all
rational calculations aside. The needlessness of Germany’s decision to go to war
in both instances has been illustrated by the fact that, despite two major defeats
and after being deprived of about a third of its pre-World War I territory,
Germany remains Europe’s most powerful, and probably most influential,
nation.
As for the Soviet Union in 1939, it was ill-equipped for the struggle that was
about to take place. Yet, by the end of World War II, it counted as a global
superpower. As Richelieu had in the seventeenth century, Stalin in the twentieth
century took advantage of the fragmentation in Central Europe. The ascent of the
United States to superpower status was foreordained by America’s industrial
might. The Soviet ascendancy had its origin in the ruthless manipulation of
Stalin’s bazaar.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Nazi-Soviet Pact
Until 1941, Hitler and Stalin had pursued untraditional goals by using
traditional means. Stalin waited for the day when a communist world might be
steered from within the Kremlin. Hitler had outlined his mad vision of a racially
pure empire governed by the German master race in his book, Mein Kampf. Two
more revolutionary visions could hardly have been imagined. Yet the means
which Hitler and Stalin employed, culminating in their pact of 1939, could have
been taken from a treatise on eighteenth-century statecraft. On one level, the
Nazi-Soviet Pact was a repetition of the partitions of Poland effected by
Frederick the Great, Catherine the Great, and Empress Maria Theresa in 1772.
Unlike these three monarchs, however, Hitler and Stalin were ideological
adversaries. For a while, their common national interest in seeking the demise of
Poland overrode their ideological differences. When their pact finally unraveled
in 1941, the largest land war in the history of mankind was unleashed, in effect
by the will of one man. It is no small irony that the twentieth century—the age of
popular will and of impersonal forces—should have been forged by so few
individuals, and that its greatest calamity might have been avoided by the
elimination of a single individual.
As the German army smashed Poland in less than a month, the French forces,
confronting only under-strength German divisions, watched passively from
behind the Maginot Line. A period appropriately nicknamed the “phony war”
followed, during which France’s demoralization became complete. For hundreds
of years, France had been fighting wars for specific political objectives—to keep
Central Europe divided or, as in World War I, to regain Alsace-Lorraine. Now it
was supposed to be fighting on behalf of a country which had already been
conquered and in the defense of which it had not lifted a finger. In effect,
France’s dispirited population faced another fait accompli and a war which
lacked an underlying strategy.
For how did Great Britain and France propose to win the war against a
country which had nearly prevailed against them when Russia and the United
States were on the side of the Allies? They were acting as if it were possible to
wait behind the Maginot Line for the British blockade of Germany to squeeze
Hitler into submission. But why should Germany hold still for this slow
strangulation? And why should it attack the Maginot Line when the road through
Belgium lay wide open, this time to be taken by the full German army since
there was no longer an Eastern front? And if defense was indeed as dominant in
war as the French general staff believed—despite the contrary lesson of the
Polish campaign—what other fate could await France than a second war of
attrition in a generation and before it had recovered from the first?
While France waited, Stalin seized his strategic opportunity. But before the
secret protocol regarding the division of Eastern Europe could be implemented,
Stalin wanted it revised. Like an eighteenth-century prince disposing of territory
without even a tip of the hat to self-determination, Stalin proposed a new deal to
Germany less than a month after completing the Nazi-Soviet Pact: swapping the
Polish territory between Warsaw and the Curzon Line, which, under the secret
protocol, was to go to the Soviet Union, for Lithuania, which was to go to
Germany. Stalin’s purpose, of course, was to create an additional buffer for
Leningrad. Nor did he seem to feel the need for so much as the pretense of any
justification for his geostrategic maneuvers other than the requirements of Soviet
security. Hitler accepted Stalin’s proposal.
Stalin wasted no time collecting on his end of the secret protocol. With the
war in Poland still raging, the Soviet Union proposed a military alliance to the
three tiny Baltic States, along with the right to establish military bases on their
territory. Denied help from the West, the small republics had no alternative other
than to take this first step in losing their independence. On September 17, 1939,
less than three weeks after the outbreak of the war, the Red Army occupied the
slice of Poland that had been designated to the Soviet sphere.
By November, it was Finland’s turn. Stalin demanded Soviet military bases on
Finnish soil and the surrender of the Karelian Isthmus, near Leningrad. But
Finland proved to be made of sterner stuff. It rejected the Soviet demand and
fought when Stalin went to war. Though Finnish forces inflicted severe losses on
the Red Army, which was still reeling from Stalin’s massive purges, in the end
numbers told. After a few months of heroic resistance, Finland succumbed to the
Soviet Union’s crushing superiority.
In terms of the grand strategy of the Second World War, the Russo-Finnish
war was a sideshow. Yet it served to demonstrate the degree to which France and
Great Britain had lost their sense for the strategic realities. Blinded by a
temporary stalemate imposed by the outnumbered Finns, London and Paris
seduced themselves with the suicidal speculation that the Soviet Union might
represent the soft underbelly of the Axis (to which, of course, it did not belong).
Preparations were made to send 30,000 troops into Finland through Sweden and
Northern Norway. On the way, they would cut Germany off from the iron ore in
Northern Norway and Sweden, which was being shipped to Germany from the
northern Norwegian port of Narvik. The fact that neither of these countries was
prepared to grant them transit rights did not dim the enthusiasm of the French
and British planners.
The threat of Allied intervention may have helped Finland to obtain a better
settlement than the original Soviet demands would have suggested but, in the
end, nothing could keep Stalin from pushing the Soviet defense line away from
the approaches to Leningrad. For historians, the puzzle remains as to what
possessed Great Britain and France to come within a hairsbreadth of fighting
both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany simultaneously three months before
the collapse of France proved the whole scheme was nothing but a pipedream.
In May 1940, the “phony war” ended. The German army repeated its
maneuver of 1914 by wheeling through Belgium, the principal difference being
that the major thrust was now at the center of the front rather than on the right
wing. Paying the price for a decade and a half of doubts and evasions, France
collapsed. Though the efficiency of the German military machine was by now
well established, observers were shocked at the speed with which France was
routed. In the First World War, German armies had spent four years pushing
toward Paris in vain; every mile was achieved at enormous human expense. In
1940, the German Blitzkrieg cut through France; by the end of June, German
troops were marching along the Champs-Elysées. Hitler seemed to be master of
the Continent.
But, like other conquerors before him, Hitler did not know how to end the war
he had so recklessly started. He had three choices: he could try to defeat Great
Britain; he could make peace with Great Britain; or he could seek to conquer the
Soviet Union and then, using its vast resources, turn back west with all his forces
and complete the destruction of Great Britain.
During the summer of 1940, Hitler attempted the first two approaches. In a
boastful speech on July 19, he hinted that he was prepared to make a
compromise peace with Great Britain. In effect, he asked it to relinquish the
prewar German colonies and to renounce interference in affairs on the Continent.
In return, he would guarantee the British Empire.1
Hitler’s proposal was analogous to what imperial Germany had been offering
Great Britain for two decades prior to World War I—though then it had been
framed in more conciliatory language and England’s strategic situation had been
much more favorable. Perhaps, if Hitler had been more specific about what a
Europe organized by Germany would look like, some of the British leaders—
such as Lord Halifax, though never Churchill—toying with the idea of
negotiating with Germany might have been tempted. By in effect asking Great
Britain to grant Germany complete freedom of action on the Continent, Hitler
evoked the traditional British response—one which Sir Edward Grey had made
in 1909 in reaction to a similar proposal by far more rational German leaders
than Hitler (and while France was still a major power) when he noted that, if
Great Britain sacrificed the Continental nations to Germany, it would sooner or
later be attacked on the British Isles (see chapter 7). Nor would Great Britain
take seriously a “guarantee” for its Empire. No German leader ever grasped the
British view that any nation capable of protecting the Empire was also capable
of conquering it—as Sir Eyre Crowe had already pointed out in his famous 1907
Memorandum (see chapter 7).
Churchill, of course, was far too sophisticated and had studied too much
history to have any illusion that, at the end of the war, Great Britain would still
be the premier world power or even in the front rank. Either Germany or the
United States would claim that position. Churchill’s intransigence toward
Germany in the summer of 1940 can therefore be interpreted as a decision in
favor of American over German hegemony. American preeminence might prove
uncomfortable at times, but at least its culture and language were familiar and
there were no ostensibly clashing interests. Finally, there was always the
prospect of that “special” relationship between Great Britain and America that
would have been inconceivable with Nazi Germany. By the summer of 1940,
Hitler had maneuvered himself into the position where he himself had become
the casus belli.
Hitler now turned to his second option of seeking to destroy the British air
force and, if necessary, of invading the British Isles. But he never went further
than to toy with the idea. Landing operations had not been a part of German
prewar planning, and the plan was abandoned because of a shortage of landing
craft and the inability of the Luftwaffe to destroy the Royal Air Force. By the
end of the summer, Germany again found itself in a position not so very
dissimilar from the one it had been in during the First World War; having
achieved major successes, it was unable to translate them into final victory.
Hitler, of course, was in an excellent position to go on the strategic defensive
—Great Britain was not strong enough to challenge the German army alone;
America would have found it nearly impossible to enter the war; and Stalin,
however he might play with the idea of intervention, would in the end always
have found some reason to postpone it. But waiting for others to take the
initiative was against Hitler’s nature. It was therefore inevitable that his mind
would turn to an attack on the Soviet Union.
As early as July 1940, Hitler ordered preliminary staff plans for a Soviet
campaign. He told his generals that, once the Soviet Union was defeated, Japan
would be able to throw all its armed forces against America, diverting
Washington’s attention to the Pacific. An isolated Great Britain without the
prospect of American support would be forced to give up the fight: “Britain’s
hope lies in Russia and the United States,” Hitler noted accurately. “If the hopes
pinned on Russia are disappointed then America too will fall by the wayside,
because elimination of Russia would tremendously increase Japan’s power in the
Far East….”2 Hitler, however, was not quite ready to give the order to attack.
First he would explore the possibility of luring the Soviets into a joint attack on
the British Empire and of disposing of the British before turning east.
Stalin realized all too well the difficulty of his position. France’s collapse
wrecked the expectation—which Stalin had shared with all the Western military
experts—that the war would be the same sort of lengthy struggle of attrition that
World War I had been. Stalin’s fondest hope, that Germany and the Western
democracies would exhaust themselves, had evaporated. If Great Britain fell as
well, the German army would be freed for an attack eastward, and would be able
to make use of the full resources of Europe according to the concept Hitler had
advertised in Mein Kampf.
Stalin reacted in nearly stereotypic fashion. At no point in his career did he
react to danger by displaying fear, even when he must have felt it. Convinced
that an admission of weakness would tempt an adversary to raise his terms, he
always tried to obscure strategic dilemmas with intransigence. If Hitler tried to
exploit his victory in the West by applying pressure against the Soviet Union,
Stalin would make the prospect of extracting concessions from him as
unattractive and painful as possible. An excruciatingly careful calculator, he
failed, however, to take into account Hitler’s neurotic personality and thus
excluded the possibility that Hitler might respond to a challenge with a two-front
war, no matter how reckless such a course.
Stalin opted for a two-pronged strategy. He accelerated harvesting the
remainder of the booty promised him in the secret protocol. In June 1940, while
Hitler was still occupied with France, Stalin issued an ultimatum to Romania to
cede Bessarabia and also demanded northern Bukovina. The latter was not part
of the secret agreement, and possession of it would place Soviet forces all along
the Romanian portion of the Danube River. That same month, he incorporated
the Baltic States into the Soviet Union by forcing them to agree to sham
elections in which not quite 20 percent of the population participated. When the
process was completed, Stalin had regained all the territory Russia had lost at the
end of the First World War; and the Allies had paid the last of a series of
installments on the cost of having excluded both Germany and the Soviet Union
from the 1919 Peace Conference.
Concurrent with strengthening his strategic position, Stalin continued his
efforts to placate his ominous neighbor by supplying Hitler’s war machine with
raw materials. As early as February 1940—before Germany’s victory over
France—a trade agreement was signed in Stalin’s presence committing the
Soviet Union to deliver large quantities of raw materials to Germany. Germany,
in turn, provided the Soviet Union with coal and manufactured goods. The
Soviet Union meticulously observed the provisions of the agreement and
generally exceeded them. Indeed, literally up to the very moment when the
Germans finally attacked, Soviet railroad cars were still crossing the border
checkpoints with their deliveries.
None of Stalin’s moves, however, could alter the geopolitical reality that
Germany had become the dominant power in Central Europe. Hitler had made it
quite plain that he would not tolerate any Soviet expansion beyond the
provisions of the secret protocol. In August 1940, Germany and Italy forced
Romania, which Stalin by this time considered a part of the Soviet sphere of
influence, to return two-thirds of Transylvania to Hungary, a near-ally of the
Axis Powers. Determined to protect Romania’s oil supplies, Hitler drew the line
more explicitly in September by guaranteeing Romania and ordering a motorized
division and air forces to Romania to back up the guarantee.
In the same month, tension grew at the other end of Europe. In violation of the
secret protocol, which had placed Finland in the Soviet sphere of influence,
Finland agreed to permit German troops to cross its territory en route to
Northern Norway. Moreover, there were significant German arms deliveries,
whose only conceivable objective could be to strengthen Finland against Soviet
pressure. When Molotov asked Berlin for more concrete information, he was
given evasive replies. Soviet and German troops were beginning to jostle each
other across the entire length of Europe.
For Stalin, the most ominous new development, however, occurred on
September 27, 1940, when Germany, Italy, and Japan signed a Tripartite Pact
obliging each of them to go to war against any additional country that joined the
British side. To be sure, the Pact specifically excluded the relations of each of
the signatories with the Soviet Union. This meant that Japan undertook no
obligation to participate in a German-Soviet war, no matter who struck first, but
was required to fight America in case it entered the war against Germany.
Though the Tripartite Pact was ostensibly aimed at Washington, Stalin had no
cause to feel reassured. Whatever the legal provisions, he had to expect that the
three Pact members would at some point turn on him. That he was the odd man
out was evident from the fact that he had not even been informed about the
negotiations until the Pact had been concluded.
By the fall of 1940, tensions were mounting at such a rate that the two
dictators made what would turn out to be their last diplomatic effort to
outmaneuver each other. Hitler’s goal was to lure Stalin into a joint assault on
the British Empire so as to destroy him all the more surely once Germany’s rear
was secure. Stalin attempted to gain time in the hope that Hitler might overreach
somewhere along the way, but also in order to determine what he might be able
to scavenge in the process. Nothing came of the efforts to arrange a face-to-face
meeting between Hitler and Stalin in the wake of the Tripartite Pact. Each leader
did his best to avoid it by claiming he could not leave his own country, and the
logical meeting place—Brest-Litovsk, at the frontier—carried too much
historical baggage.
On October 13, 1940, Ribbentrop wrote a long letter to Stalin giving his own
interpretation of the course of events since his visit to Moscow the year before. It
was an unusual breach of protocol for a foreign minister to address not his
counterpart but a leader who did not even have a formal governmental office
(Stalin’s sole position remained General Secretary of the Communist Party).
Ribbentrop’s letter compensated in pomposity for its lack of diplomatic
finesse. He blamed Soviet-German disagreements over Finland and Romania on
British machinations, without explaining how London might have accomplished
such a feat. And he insisted that the Tripartite Pact had not been directed against
the Soviet Union—indeed, the Soviet Union would be welcome to join in a
division of the spoils between the European dictators and Japan after the war.
Ribbentrop concluded by inviting Molotov to pay a return visit to Berlin. On that
occasion, Ribbentrop averred the possibility that the Soviet Union’s joining the
Tripartite Pact could be discussed.3
Stalin was far too cautious to divide spoils which had not yet been conquered,
or to enter the front line of a confrontation designed by others. Still, he would
keep open the option of dividing the booty with Hitler in case Great Britain
simply collapsed—just as he would do in 1945, when he joined the war against
Japan in its final stage for a heavy price. On October 22, Stalin replied to
Ribbentrop’s letter with alacrity laced with irony. Thanking Ribbentrop for his
“instructive analysis of recent events,” he refrained from offering his own
personal assessment of them. Perhaps to show that two could play at stretching
protocol, he accepted the invitation for Molotov to come to Berlin, unilaterally
setting a very early date—November 10—less than three weeks away.4
Hitler accepted the proposal immediately, which led to another
misunderstanding. Stalin interpreted the speed of Hitler’s acceptance to mean
that the Soviet relationship remained as crucial to Germany as it had been the
previous year, hence as proof that his tough tactics were paying off. Hitler’s
eagerness, however, sprang from his need to get on with his planning if he were
indeed to attack the Soviet Union in the spring of 1941.
The depth of distrust between these two would-be partners was evident before
the meetings even started. Molotov refused to board a German train sent to the
border to escort him to Berlin. The Soviet delegation was obviously concerned
that the elegance of the German cars might be matched by the extensiveness of
their bugging devices. (In the end, the German cars were hitched onto the back
of the Soviet train, whose undercarriages had been specially constructed so that
they could be adjusted to the narrower European gauge at the border.)
Negotiations finally began on November 12. Molotov, who had a faculty to
irritate far more stable personalities than Hitler, exhibited his abrasive tactics
with a vengeance before the Nazi leadership. His innate truculence was
reinforced by his terror of Stalin, whom he feared much more than he did Hitler.
Molotov’s obsessive concern with his own domestic situation was typical of
diplomats during the entire Soviet period, though it was particularly acute while
Stalin was in power. Soviet negotiators always seemed much more aware of their
domestic constraints than of those in the international arena.
Since foreign ministers were rarely members of the Politburo (Gromyko only
became a member in 1973, after sixteen years as Foreign Minister), their
domestic base was weak and they were always in danger of becoming
scapegoats for negotiations gone wrong. Moreover, since the Soviets assumed
that history was ultimately on their side, they were more inclined to stonewall
than to seek broad solutions. Every negotiation with Soviet diplomats turned into
a test of endurance; no concession would ever be forthcoming until the Soviet
negotiator had convinced himself—and particularly those who read the cables in
Moscow—that every last ounce of flexibility had been extracted from the other
side. On the basis of this kind of diplomatic guerrilla warfare, they obtained
whatever could be had through persistence and pressure, but they usually missed
the opportunity for a real breakthrough. Soviet negotiators—with Gromyko as
the master of the game—became extremely adept at wearing down opponents
who were saddled with preconceived ideas and impatient for a settlement. On
the other hand, they tended to miss the forest for the trees. Thus, in 1971, they
lost the opportunity to hold a summit meeting with Nixon, which would have
delayed his opening to Beijing, by spending months haggling over essentially
meaningless preconditions—all of which the Soviets dropped as soon as
Washington had acquired a Chinese option.
It is not possible to imagine two men less likely to communicate than Hitler
and Molotov. Hitler was not in any event suited to negotiations, preferring to
overwhelm his interlocutors with extended monologues while exhibiting no sign
of listening to the response, if indeed he left time for a response. In dealing with
foreign leaders, Hitler usually confined himself to passionate statements of
general principle. On the few occasions he did participate in actual negotiations
—as with the Austrian Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg or Neville
Chamberlain—he adopted a bullying manner and put forward peremptory
demands which he rarely modified. Molotov, on the other hand, was less
interested in principles than in their application. And he had no scope for
compromise.
In November 1940, Molotov found himself in a genuinely difficult position.
Stalin was bound to be hard to please, torn as he was between his reluctance to
contribute to a German victory and his worry that, should Germany defeat Great
Britain without Soviet assistance, he might miss an opportunity to share in
Hitler’s conquests. Whatever did happen, Stalin was determined never to return
to the Versailles arrangement, and attempted to protect his position by hedging
every move. The secret protocol and subsequent events had made his conception
of appropriate arrangements quite clear to the Germans—perhaps too clear. In
this sense, Molotov’s visit to Berlin was seen as an opportunity for elaboration.
As for the democracies, Stalin had used the occasion of a visit in July 1940 by
the new British Ambassador, Sir Stafford Cripps, to reject any possibility of a
return to the Versailles order. When Cripps argued that the fall of France had
made it necessary for the Soviet Union to take an interest in restoring the balance
of power, Stalin replied icily:
The socalled European balance of power had hitherto oppressed not only Germany but also the
Soviet Union. Therefore the Soviet Union would take all measures to prevent the reestablishment of
the old balance of power in Europe.5
In diplomatic language, “all measures” usually embraces the threat of war.
For Molotov, the stakes could hardly have been higher. Since Hitler’s record
left little doubt that he would not let 1941 go by without launching some kind of
major campaign, it was probable that, if Stalin did not join him in attacking the
British Empire, he might well attack the Soviet Union. Molotov therefore faced a
de facto ultimatum masquerading as seduction—though Stalin underestimated
how short the deadline actually was.
Ribbentrop opened the conversations by outlining why a German victory was
inevitable. He urged Molotov to join the Tripartite Pact, undeterred by the fact
that this treaty was an elaboration of what had originally been the Anti-
Comintern Pact. On that basis, argued Ribbentrop, it would be possible to
“establish spheres of influence between Russia, Germany, Italy, and Japan along
very broad lines.”6 According to Ribbentrop, this should not lead to conflict,
because each of the prospective partners was above all interested in expanding
southward. Japan would move into Southeast Asia, Italy into North Africa, and
Germany would reclaim its former colonies in Africa. After many
circumlocutions to emphasize his cleverness, Ribbentrop finally identified the
prize which had been reserved for the Soviet Union: “…whether Russia in the
long run would not also turn to the South for the natural outlet to the open sea
that was so important for Russia.”7
Anyone even vaguely familiar with Hitler’s public statements knew this was
nonsense. Africa had always been a low Nazi priority. Not only had Hitler never
shown any particular interest in it, but Molotov probably had read enough of
Mein Kampf to realize that it was Lebensraum in Russia that Hitler was really
after. Having silently sat through Ribbentrop’s exposition, Molotov now inquired
matter-of-factly, though somewhat insolently, to what sea the Soviet Union was
supposed to be seeking this outlet. Answering with another ponderous
circumlocution, Ribbentrop finally mentioned the Persian Gulf, as if it were
already Germany’s to give away:
The question now was, whether they could not continue in the future also to do good business
together… whether in the long run the most advantageous access to the sea for Russia could not be
found in the direction of the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea, and whether at the same time certain
other aspirations of Russia in this part of Asia—in which Germany was completely disinterested—
could not also be realized.8
Molotov had no interest in so bombastic a proposal. Germany did not yet possess
what it purported to offer, and the Soviet Union did not need Germany to
conquer these territories for itself. Expressing his willingness in principle to join
the Tripartite Pact, Molotov immediately hedged the concession with the
argument that “precision was necessary in a delineation of spheres of influence
over a rather long period of time.”9 This, of course, could not be completed on
just one visit to Berlin and would require extended consultations, including a
return visit to Moscow by Ribbentrop.
That afternoon, Molotov met with Hitler in the newly completed marble
Chancellery. Everything had been arranged to awe the proletarian minister from
Moscow. Molotov was led along a vast corridor on both sides of which, every
few yards, tall SS men in black uniforms came to attention and raised their arms
in the Nazi salute. The doors to Hitler’s office reached all the way to the high
ceiling and were thrown open by two particularly tall SS men whose raised arms
formed an arch beneath which Molotov was ushered into Hitler’s presence.
Seated at his desk along the far wall of the enormous room, Hitler silently
observed his visitors for a few moments, then sprang up and, still without saying
a word, shook hands with each member of the Soviet delegation. As he invited
them to sit down in the lounge area, some curtains were parted and Ribbentrop
and a few advisers joined the group.10
Having inflicted the Nazi version of majesty on his guests, Hitler laid out his
idea of the purpose of their meeting. He proposed agreeing on a joint long-term
strategy because both Germany and the Soviet Union “had at their helm men
who possessed sufficient authority to commit their countries to a development in
a definite direction.”11 What Hitler had in mind was setting up a kind of joint
Monroe Doctrine with the Soviets for the whole of Europe and Africa, and
dividing the colonial territories between themselves.
Demonstrating that he had not been in the least intimidated by his reception,
seemingly drawn from some Viennese operetta’s vision of grandeur, Molotov
confined himself to a series of precise questions: What was the ultimate purpose
of the Tripartite Pact? Of Hitler’s definition of his self-proclaimed New Order?
Of the Greater Asian Sphere? Of German intentions in the Balkans? Was the
understanding placing Finland in the Soviet sphere of influence still valid?
No one had ever taken over a conversation with Hitler in this manner, or
subjected him to a cross-examination. In any event, Hitler was not interested in
limiting German freedom of action in any area his armies were capable of
reaching—certainly not in Europe.
The next day’s meeting with Hitler was prefaced by a spartan lunch and did
not make any better progress. Characteristically, Hitler started out with an
extended monologue, during which he explained how he proposed to divide the
world with Stalin:
After the conquest of England the British Empire would be apportioned as a gigantic worldwide
estate in bankruptcy…. In this bankrupt estate there would be access for Russia to the ice-free and
really open ocean. Thus far, a minority of 45 million Englishmen had ruled the 600 million
inhabitants of the British Empire. He was about to crush this minority….
In these circumstances there arose worldwide perspectives…. Russia’s participation in the
solution of these problems would have to be arranged. All the countries that could possibly be
interested in the bankrupt estate would have to stop all controversies and concern themselves
exclusively with apportioning the British Empire.12
Replying sardonically that he agreed with what he had understood, Molotov
promised to report the remainder to Moscow. Concurring in principle with
Hitler’s statement that the Soviet Union and Germany had no conflicting
interests, he immediately put the proposition to a practical test by inquiring what
Germany’s reaction would be if the Soviet Union extended a guarantee to
Bulgaria similar to the one Germany had given to Romania (which would in
effect block further extension of German influence in the Balkans). And what
about the Soviet Union’s annexing Finland? Clearly, self-determination was not
a principle of Soviet foreign policy, and Stalin would not hesitate to annex nonRussian populations if he could do so without German interference. Not only the
territorial settlement but the moral principles of the Versailles settlement were
dead.
The tense atmosphere at the meeting did not ease any when Hitler pointed out
rather testily that Bulgaria did not seem to have asked for a Soviet alliance. And
he rejected the annexation of Finland on the ground that it went beyond the
secret protocol, sidestepping the fact that going beyond the protocol had been the
whole point of Molotov’s journey to Berlin. The meeting was ending on a sour
note. As Hitler rose, mumbling something about the possibility of a British air
raid, Molotov reiterated his basic message: “The Soviet Union, as a great power,
cannot remain aloof from the great issues in Europe and Asia.”13 Without
specifying how the Soviet Union would reciprocate if Hitler granted its wishes,
Molotov merely promised that, after he had reported to Stalin, he would convey
his chiefs ideas about an appropriate sphere of influence to Hitler.
Hitler was so annoyed that he did not attend a dinner hosted by Molotov at the
Soviet Embassy—though most of the other Nazi leaders were present. The
dinner was interrupted by a British air raid and, since the Soviet Embassy had no
air-raid shelter, the guests scattered in all directions. The Nazi leaders shuttled
off in limousines, the Soviet delegation to the Bellevue Castle (which currently
houses the German president when he is in Berlin), while Ribbentrop took
Molotov to his private air-raid shelter nearby. There, he brandished a German
draft of Soviet adherence to the Tripartite Pact without seeming to understand
that Molotov had neither the inclination nor the authority to go beyond what he
had told Hitler. Molotov, on his part, ignored the draft and went on to raise the
very issues Hitler had avoided, reiterating that the Soviet Union could not be
excluded from any European question. He then specifically listed Yugoslavia,
Poland, Greece, Sweden, and Turkey, conspicuously avoiding the grand vistas
along the Indian Ocean which Ribbentrop and Hitler had earlier put before
him.14
Behind Molotov’s insolent and intransigent style was an attempt to gain time
for Stalin to resolve a nearly insoluble quandary. Hitler was offering him a
partnership in the defeat of Great Britain. But it did not take much imagination
to realize that, afterward, the Soviet Union would stand naked before its would-
be partners in the Tripartite Pact, all of them former associates in the AntiComintern Pact. On the other hand, if Great Britain were to collapse without
Soviet assistance, it might be desirable for the Soviet Union to improve its
strategic position for the inevitable showdown with Hitler.
In the end, Stalin never did decide which course to pursue. On November 25,
Molotov sent Stalin’s conditions for joining the Tripartite Pact to Ribbentrop:
Germany would have to withdraw its troops from Finland and give the Soviet
Union a free hand in that country; Bulgaria would need to join a military alliance
with the Soviet Union and permit Soviet bases on its territory; Turkey would be
required to accept Soviet bases on its territory, including the Dardanelles.
Germany would stand aside if the Soviet Union pursued its strategic objectives
in the Balkans and the Dardanelles by force. As an elaboration of Hitler’s own
offer that the area south of Batum and Baku be recognized as a Soviet sphere of
interest, Stalin now defined the sphere to include Iran and the Persian Gulf. As
for Japan, it would have to abandon any claim to mineral rights on Sakhalin
Island.15 Stalin had to know that these conditions would never be accepted since
they blocked any further German expansion toward the east, and since he had
offered no commensurable Soviet reciprocal act.
Stalin’s reply to Hitler therefore primarily served to signal what he considered
to be the Soviet sphere of interest, and as a warning that he would resist its
impairment, at least diplomatically. Over the course of the next decade,
employing the tactics of the tsars, Stalin proceeded to establish that sphere by
agreement whenever possible, by force when necessary. He pursued the
objectives outlined in the November 25 memorandum, first in concert with
Hitler, next on the side of the democracies against Hitler, and finally through
confrontation with the democracies. Then, toward the very end of his life, Stalin
seemed on the verge of exploring a grand bargain with the democracies to
safeguard what he never ceased to treat as the Soviet sphere of influence (see
chapter 20).
For Hitler, the die was already cast. As early as the day of Molotov’s arrival in
Berlin, Hitler had ordered all preparations for an attack on the Soviet Union to
continue, with the final decision to be delayed until an operational plan had been
approved.16 In Hitler’s mind, the only decision had always been whether to
attack the Soviet Union before or after he had defeated Great Britain. And
Molotov’s visit settled that issue. On November 14, the day Molotov left Berlin,
Hitler ordered the staff plans of the summer to be turned into an operational
concept for an attack on the Soviet Union by the summer of 1941. When he
received Stalin’s proposal of November 25, he ordered that no reply be returned.
Nor did Stalin ever ask for one. German military preparations for a war on
Russia now moved into high gear.
There has been considerable debate about whether Stalin ever grasped the
impact of his tactics on a personality like Hitler. In all likelihood, he
underestimated the deadly impatience of his adversary. For he seems to have
assumed that Hitler was, like himself, a cool and careful calculator who would
not willingly launch his armies into the vast spaces of Russia before he had
concluded the war in the west. In this assumption, Stalin was wrong. Hitler
believed that willpower could overcome all obstacles. His typical response to
resistance was to turn it into a personal confrontation. Hitler could never wait for
conditions to mature fully, if only because the act of waiting implied that
circumstances might transcend his will.
Stalin not only was more patient but, as a communist, had more respect for
historical forces. In his nearly thirty years of rule, he never staked everything on
one throw of the dice and, mistakenly, believed that Hitler would not do so
either. In the meantime, Stalin was morbidly concerned that rash Soviet
deployments might trigger a German preemptive attack. And he misconstrued
Hitler’s eagerness to enlist him in the Tripartite Pact as proof that the Nazis were
planning to devote 1941 to further attempts to bring down Great Britain.
Apparently, Stalin believed that the following year, 1942, was to be the year of
decision for a war with Germany. His biographer Dmitri Volkogonov told me
that Stalin was keeping open the option of a preemptive war against Germany in
that year, which may explain why Soviet armies were deployed so far forward in
1941. Expecting Hitler to state major demands before attacking, Stalin probably
would have gone quite a distance to meet these demands—at least in 1941.
All such calculations failed because their basic assumption was that Hitler
engaged in rational calculations; however, Hitler did not consider himself bound
by a normal calculation of risks. Nary a year of Hitler’s rule had gone by without
his committing some action which his entourage had warned him was too
dangerous: rearmament in 1934–35; reoccupying the Rhineland in 1936;
occupying Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938; attacking Poland in 1939; and
the campaign against France in 1940. Nor was it Hitler’s intention to let 1941
turn into an exception. Given his personality, he could only have been bought off
if the Soviet Union had decided to join the Tripartite Pact with minimum
conditions and had participated in a military operation against Great Britain in
the Middle East. Then, with Great Britain defeated and the Soviet Union
isolated, Hitler would surely have gone on to fulfill his lifelong obsession for
conquests in the east.
No amount of clever maneuvering on the part of Stalin could, in the end,
prevent his country’s ending up in much the same position as Poland had the
year before. The Polish government could only have avoided a German attack in
1939 by agreeing to yield the Polish Corridor and Danzig, and then by joining a
Nazi crusade against the Soviet Union—at the end of all of which Poland would
still have been at Hitler’s mercy. Now, a year later, it seemed that the Soviet
Union could only buy a respite from German aggression by submitting to Nazi
proposals (at the price of total isolation and by entering a risky war against Great
Britain). In the end, however, it would still face an attack from Germany.
Steely-nerved, Stalin maintained his two-track policy of cooperating with
Germany by supplying war materials while opposing it geopolitically, as if no
danger existed at all. Though he was not willing to join the Tripartite Pact, he did
grant Japan the sole benefit which Soviet adherence to the Pact would have
brought it by freeing Japan’s rear for adventures in Asia.
Though obviously unaware of Hitler’s briefing to his generals that an attack
on the Soviet Union would enable Japan to challenge the United States overtly,
Stalin reached the same conclusion independently and set out to remove that
incentive. On April 13, 1941, he concluded a nonaggression treaty with Japan in
Moscow, following essentially the same tactics in the face of mounting Asian
tensions that he had adopted toward the Polish crisis eighteen months earlier. In
each case, he removed the aggressor’s risk of a two-front war, and he managed
to deflect war from Soviet territory by encouraging what he considered a
capitalist civil war elsewhere. The Hitler-Stalin Pact had gained him a two-year
respite, and the nonaggression treaty with Japan enabled him six months later to
throw his Far Eastern army into the battle for Moscow, which decided the
outcome of the war in his favor.
After concluding the nonaggression treaty, Stalin, in an unprecedented
gesture, saw the Japanese Foreign Minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, off at the train
station. Symbolic of the importance Stalin attached to the treaty, it also provided
him with the occasion—in the presence of the entire diplomatic corps—to invite
negotiations with Germany while flaunting his increased bargaining power. “The
European problem can be solved in a natural way if Japan and the Soviets
cooperate,” said Stalin to the Foreign Minister loudly enough for everyone to
hear—probably to imply that, with his eastern border secure, his bargaining
position in Europe had improved, but perhaps also that Germany did not need to
go to war with the Soviet Union to free Japan’s rear for war with the United
States.
“Not only the European problem,” replied the Japanese Foreign Minister.
“The whole world can be settled!” affirmed Stalin—as long as others do the
fighting, he must have thought, and the Soviet Union receives compensation for
their successes.
As a way of conveying his message to Berlin, Stalin then walked over to
German Ambassador von der Schulenburg, put his arm around him, and
announced, “We must remain friends and you must now do everything to that
end.” To make sure he had used every channel, including the military, to convey
his message, Stalin next walked over to the acting German military attaché and
said loudly, “We will stay friends with you, whatever happens.”17
Stalin had every reason to be concerned about German attitudes. As Molotov
had hinted in Berlin, he had been pressing Bulgaria to accept a Soviet guarantee.
Stalin had also negotiated a friendship and nonaggression treaty with Yugoslavia
in April 1941, at the precise moment Germany was seeking transit rights through
Yugoslavia to attack Greece—a course of conduct certain to encourage Yugoslav
resistance to German pressures. As it turned out, the Soviet treaty with
Yugoslavia was signed only hours before the German army crossed the Yugoslav
frontier.
Stalin’s principal weakness as a statesman was his tendency to ascribe to his
adversaries the same capacity for cold calculation of which he was so proud in
himself. This caused Stalin to underestimate the impact of his own intransigence
and to overestimate the scope available in his, however rare, efforts at
conciliation. This attitude was to blight his relations with the democracies after
the war. In 1941, he was clearly convinced up until the time the Germans crossed
the Soviet border that he might at the last minute stave off the assault by
generating a negotiation—during which all the indications are that he was
prepared to make vast concessions.
Stalin certainly did not fail to deflect an attack from Germany for lack of
trying. On May 6, 1941, the Soviet people were informed that Stalin had taken
over the position of Prime Minister from Molotov, who remained as Deputy
Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs. It was the first time that Stalin
emerged from the recesses of the Communist Party to assume visible
responsibility for the day-to-day conduct of affairs.
Only circumstances of extreme peril could have propelled Stalin to abandon
the aura of mysterious menace that was his preferred method of government.
Andrei Vyshinsky, then Deputy Foreign Minister, told the Ambassador of Vichy
France that Stalin’s emergence in public office marked “the greatest historical
event in the Soviet Union since its inception.”18 Von der Schulenburg thought he
had divined Stalin’s purpose. “In my opinion,” he told Ribbentrop, “it may be
assumed with certainty that Stalin has set himself a foreign policy goal of
overwhelming importance for the Soviet Union, which he hopes to attain by his
personal efforts. I firmly believe that, in an international situation which he
considers serious, Stalin has set himself the goal of preserving the Soviet Union
from a conflict with Germany.”19
The next few weeks demonstrated the accuracy of the German Ambassador’s
prediction. As a way of sending a signal of reassurance to Germany, TASS, on
May 8, denied that there were any unusual Soviet troop concentrations along the
western borders. Over the following weeks, Stalin broke diplomatic relations
with every European government-in-exile located in London—with the
wounding explanation that their affairs should henceforth be dealt with by the
German Embassy. Stalin simultaneously recognized the puppet governments
Germany had set up in some of the occupied territories. In sum, Stalin went out
of his way to assure Germany that he recognized all its existing conquests.
To remove any possible pretext for aggression, Stalin would not permit
forward Soviet military units to be placed on heightened alert. And he ignored
British and American warnings of an imminent German attack—in part because
he suspected the Anglo-Saxons of trying to embroil him in a fight with Germany.
Though Stalin forbade firing on the ever-mounting German reconnaissance
overflights, well back from the front he did permit civil-defense exercises and
the calling up of reserves. Obviously, Stalin had decided that his best chance for
any last-minute deal was to reassure the Germans of his intentions, especially
since, of the countermeasures available, none was really likely to make a
decisive difference.
On June 13, nine days before the Germans attacked, TASS published another
official statement denying widespread rumors of imminent war. The Soviet
Union, the statement read, planned to observe all its existing agreements with
Germany. The release also hinted broadly at the possibility of new negotiations
leading to improved arrangements on all disputed issues. That Stalin had indeed
been prepared to make major concessions could be seen from Molotov’s reaction
when, on June 22, von der Schulenburg brought him the German declaration of
war. The Soviet Union, Molotov remonstrated plaintively, had been prepared to
remove all its troops from the frontier as a reassurance to Germany. All other
demands were negotiable. Molotov said, being uncharacteristically defensive,
“Surely we have not deserved that.”20
Apparently Stalin was so shocked by Germany’s declaration of war that he fell
into something of a depression for a period of about ten days. On July 3,
however, he resumed command, delivering a major radio address. Unlike Hitler,
Stalin was not a born orator. He rarely spoke in public, and when he did, he was
extremely pedantic. In this address too he relied on a dry recitation of the
monumental task that lay before the Russian peoples. Yet his very matter-offactness conveyed a certain resolution and the sense that the job, however huge,
was manageable.
“History shows,” said Stalin, “that there are no invincible armies, and never
have been.” Issuing orders for the destruction of all machinery and rolling stock,
and for the formation of guerrilla forces behind German lines, Stalin read off a
sheaf of figures as if he were an accountant. His sole bow to rhetoric had been at
the beginning of the speech. Never before had Stalin appealed to his people on a
personal level—nor would he ever again: “Comrades, citizens, brothers and
sisters, fighting men of our army and navy. I am speaking to you, my friends!”21
Hitler finally had the war he had always wanted. And he had sealed his doom,
which, it is possible, he had also always wanted. German leaders, now fighting
on two fronts, had overreached for the second time in a generation. Some 70
million Germans were engaged in combat against some 700 million adversaries
once Hitler had brought America into the war in December 1941. Apparently
even Hitler was awestruck at the task he had set before himself. Just hours
before the attack, he told his staff: “I feel as if I am pushing open the door to a
dark room, never seen before, without knowing what lies behind the door.”22
Stalin had gambled on Hitler’s rationality, and he had lost; Hitler had gambled
that Stalin would quickly collapse, and he too had lost. But whereas Stalin’s
error was retrievable, Hitler’s was not.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
America Re-enters the Arena: Franklin
Delano Roosevelt
For contemporary political leaders governing by public opinion polls,
Roosevelt’s role in moving his isolationist people toward participation in the war
serves as an object lesson on the scope of leadership in a democracy. Sooner or
later, the threat to the European balance of power would have forced the United
States to intervene in order to stop Germany’s drive for world domination. The
sheer, and growing, strength of America was bound to propel it eventually into
the center of the international arena. That this happened with such speed and so
decisively was the achievement of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
All great leaders walk alone. Their singularity springs from their ability to
discern challenges that are not yet apparent to their contemporaries. Roosevelt
took an isolationist people into a war between countries whose conflicts had only
a few years earlier been widely considered inconsistent with American values
and irrelevant to American security. After 1940, Roosevelt convinced the
Congress, which had overwhelmingly passed a series of Neutrality Acts just a
few years before, to authorize ever-increasing American assistance to Great
Britain, stopping just short of outright belligerency and occasionally even
crossing that line. Finally, Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor removed America’s
last hesitations. Roosevelt was able to persuade a society which had for two
centuries treasured its invulnerability of the dire perils of an Axis victory. And
he saw to it that, this time, America’s involvement would mark a first step
toward permanent international engagement. During the war, his leadership held
the alliance together and shaped the multilateral institutions which continue to
serve the international community to this day.
No president, with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln, has made a
more decisive difference in American history. Roosevelt took the oath of office
at a time of national uncertainty, when America’s faith in the New World’s
infinite capacity for progress had been severely shaken by the Great Depression.
All around him, democracies seemed to be faltering and antidemocratic
governments on both the Left and the Right were gaining ground.
After Roosevelt had restored hope at home, destiny imposed on him the
obligation of defending democracy around the world. No one has described this
aspect of Roosevelt’s contribution better than Isaiah Berlin:
[Roosevelt] looked upon the future with a calm eye, as if to say ‘Let it come, whatever it may be, it
will all be grist to our great mill. We shall turn it all to benefit.’… In a despondent world which
appeared divided between wicked and fatally efficient fanatics marching to destroy, and bewildered
populations on the run, unenthusiastic martyrs in a cause they could not define, he believed in his
own ability, so long as he was at the controls, to stem this terrible tide. He had all the character and
energy and skill of the dictators, and he was on our side.1
Roosevelt had already served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in Wilson’s
Administration, and had been the Democrats’ vice presidential candidate in the
1920 election. Many leaders, among them de Gaulle, Churchill, and Adenauer,
have been impelled to come to terms with the loneliness inherent in the journey
toward greatness by a period of withdrawal from public life. Roosevelt’s was
imposed on him when he was struck down by polio in 1921. In an extraordinary
demonstration of willpower, he overcame his disability and learned to stand with
the aid of braces and even to walk a few steps, which enabled him to appear
before the public as if he were not paralyzed at all. Until his report to the
Congress on Yalta in 1945, Roosevelt stood whenever he delivered a major
speech. Because the media cooperated with Roosevelt’s attempt to play his role
with dignity, the vast majority of Americans never realized the extent of
Roosevelt’s handicap or had its perceptions of him tinged by pity.
Roosevelt, an ebullient leader who used charm to maintain his aloofness, was
an ambiguous combination of political manipulator and visionary. He governed
more often by instinct than by analysis, and evoked strongly contrasting
emotions.2 As has been summarized by Isaiah Berlin, Roosevelt had serious
shortcomings of character, which included unscrupulousness, ruthlessness, and
cynicism. Yet Berlin concluded that, in the end, these were more than
dramatically outweighed by Roosevelt’s positive traits:
What attracted his followers were countervailing qualities of a rare and inspiring order: he was largehearted and possessed wide political horizons, imaginative sweep, understanding of the time in which
he lived and of the direction of the great new forces at work in the twentieth century….3
This was the president who propelled America into a leadership role
internationally, an environment where questions of war or peace, progress or
stagnation all around the world came to depend on his vision and commitment.
America’s journey from involvement in the First World War to active
participation in the Second proved to be a long one—interrupted as it was by the
nation’s about-face to isolationism. The depth of America’s revulsion toward
international affairs illustrates the magnitude of Roosevelt’s achievement. A
brief sketch of the historical backdrop against which Roosevelt conducted his
policies is therefore necessary.
In the 1920s, America’s mood was ambivalent, oscillating between a
willingness to assert principles of universal applicability and a need to justify
them on behalf of an isolationist foreign policy. Americans took to reciting the
traditional themes of their foreign policy with even greater emphasis: the
uniqueness of America’s mission as the exemplar of liberty, the moral
superiority of democratic foreign policy, the seamless relationship between
personal and international morality, the importance of open diplomacy, and the
replacement of the balance of power by international consensus as expressed in
the League of Nations.
All of these presumably universal principles were enlisted on behalf of
American isolationism. Americans were still incapable of believing that anything
outside the Western Hemisphere could possibly affect their security. The
America of the 1920s and 1930s rejected even its own doctrine of collective
security lest it lead to involvement in the quarrels of distant, bellicose societies.
The provisions of the Treaty of Versailles were interpreted as vindictive, and
reparations as self-defeating. When the French occupied the Ruhr, America used
the occasion to withdraw its remaining occupying forces from the Rhineland.
That Wilsonian exceptionalism had established criteria no international order
could fulfill, made disillusionment a part of its very essence.
Disillusionment with the results of the war erased to a considerable extent the
distinctions between the internationalists and the isolationists. Not even the most
liberal internationalists any longer discerned an American interest in sustaining a
flawed postwar settlement. No significant group had a good word to say about
the balance of power. What passed for internationalism was being identified with
membership in the League of Nations rather than with day-to-day participation
in international diplomacy. And even the most dedicated internationalists
insisted that the Monroe Doctrine superseded the League of Nations, and
recoiled before the idea of America’s joining League enforcement measures,
even economic ones.
The isolationists carried these attitudes toward their ultimate conclusion. They
attacked the League of Nations in principle, on the ground that it jeopardized the
twin pillars of historic American foreign policy—the Monroe Doctrine and
isolationism. The League was believed to be incompatible with the Monroe
Doctrine because collective security entitled, indeed required, the League to
involve itself in disputes within the Western Hemisphere. And was inconsistent
with isolationism because the League obliged America to involve itself in
disputes outside the Western Hemisphere.
The isolationists had a point. If the entire Western Hemisphere were somehow
excluded from the operation of collective security, what was to keep the other
nations of the world from organizing regional groupings of their own and
excluding them from the operations of the League? In that case, the League of
Nations would have led to a restoration of a balance-of-power system, albeit on a
regional basis. In practice, the internationalists and the isolationists converged on
a bipartisan foreign policy. Both rejected foreign intervention within the Western
Hemisphere and any participation in League enforcement machinery outside of
it. They supported disarmament conferences because there was a clear consensus
that arms caused war and that the reduction of arms contributed to peace. They
favored internationally endorsed general principles of peaceful settlement, such
as the Kellogg-Briand Pact, as long as these agreements did not imply
enforcement. Finally, the United States was always helpful on technical, usually
financial, issues with no immediate political consequence, such as working out
agreed reparations schedules.
The gap in American thinking between approving a principle and participating
in its enforcement became dramatically apparent after the 1921–22 Washington
Naval Conference. The Conference was important in two respects. It provided
for ceilings in naval armaments for the United States, Great Britain, and Japan,
granting to the United States a navy equal in size to that of Great Britain, and to
Japan a navy three-fifths the size of the United States. This provision reaffirmed
America’s new role as the dominant power in the Pacific alongside Japan. Great
Britain’s role in that theater was henceforth secondary. Most important, a second,
socalled Four-Power Treaty among Japan, the United States, Great Britain, and
France providing for the peaceful settlement of disputes was to replace the old
Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902, and to usher in an era of cooperation in the
Pacific. But if one of the signatories of the Four-Power Treaty disregarded its
provisions, would the others take action against it? “The four-power treaty
contains no war commitment…. There is no commitment to armed force, no
alliance, no written or moral obligation to join in defense…,” President Harding
explained to a skeptical American Senate.4
Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes reinforced the President’s words by
putting all of the signatories to the pact on notice that America would under no
circumstances participate in enforcement measures. But the Senate was still not
satisfied. In ratifying the Four-Power Treaty, the Senate added reservations
stipulating that this would not commit the United States to using armed force in
repelling aggression.5 In other words, the agreement stood on its own merit;
failure to observe it would involve no consequence. America would decide each
case as it arose, just as if there were no agreement.
In terms of the way diplomacy had been routinely practiced for centuries, it
was indeed an extraordinary proposition that a solemn treaty conferred no right
of enforcement, and that enforcement had to be separately negotiated with the
Congress on a case-by-case basis. It was a foretaste of the debates between the
Nixon Administration and the Congress after the Vietnam Peace agreement of
January 1973, wherein the Congress argued that an agreement for which
America had fought through three administrations of both parties did not confer
any right of enforcement. According to that theory, agreements with America
would reflect Washington’s mood of the moment; whatever consequences grew
out of them would likewise depend on Washington’s mood at some other
moment—an attitude not very likely to engender confidence in America’s
commitments.
The Senate’s reserve had not inhibited President Harding’s enthusiasm for the
Four-Power Treaty. At the signing ceremony, he praised it because it protected
the Philippines and marked “the beginning of a new and better epoch in human
progress.” How was it possible for a treaty without enforcement provisions to
protect a prize as rich as the Philippines? Despite his position on the opposite
end of the political spectrum, Harding invoked the standard Wilsonian liturgy.
The world, he said, would punish violators by proclaiming “the odiousness of
perfidy or infamy.”6 Harding, however, failed to explain how world public
opinion was to be determined, let alone marshaled, and for what cause, so long
as America refused to join the League of Nations.
The Kellogg-Briand Pact, the impact of which on Europe was discussed in
chapter 11, turned into another example of America’s tendency to treat principles
as self-implementing. Although American leaders enthusiastically proclaimed
the historic nature of the treaty because sixty-two nations had renounced war as
an instrument of national policy, they adamantly refused to endorse any
machinery for applying it, much less for enforcing it. President Calvin Coolidge,
waxing effusive before the Congress in December 1928, asserted: “Observance
of this Covenant… promises more for the peace of the world than any other
agreement ever negotiated among the nations.”7
Yet how was this Utopia to be achieved? Coolidge’s passionate defense of the
Kellogg-Briand Pact spurred internationalists and supporters of the League to
argue, quite reasonably, that, war having been outlawed, the concept of neutrality
had lost all meaning. In their view, since the League had been designed to
identify aggressors, the international community was obliged to punish them
appropriately. “Does anyone believe,” asked one of the proponents of this view,
“that the aggressive designs of Mussolini could be checked merely by the good
faith of the Italian people and the power of public opinion?”8
The prescience of this question did not enhance its acceptability. Even while
the treaty bearing his name was still in the process of being debated, Secretary of
State Kellogg, in an address before the Council on Foreign Relations, stressed
that force would never be used to elicit compliance. Reliance on force, he
argued, would turn what had been intended as a long stride toward peace into
precisely the sort of military alliance that was so in need of being abolished. Nor
should the Pact include a definition of aggression, since any definition would
omit something and thereby weaken the nobility of the Pact’s wording.9 For
Kellogg, the word was not only the beginning, it was the end:
A nation claiming to act in self-defense must justify itself before the bar of world opinion as well as
before the signatories of the treaty. For that reason I declined to place in the treaty a definition of
aggressor or of self-defense because I believed that no comprehensive legalistic definition could be
framed in advance…. This would make it more difficult rather than less difficult for an aggressor
nation to prove its innocence.10
The Senate was no more impressed by Kellogg’s explanations than it had been
six years earlier by Harding’s exegesis of why the Four-Power Treaty did not
mean what it said. Now it added three “understandings” of its own: in the
Senate’s view, the treaty did not limit either the right of self-defense or of the
Monroe Doctrine, nor did it create any obligation to assist victims of aggression
—which meant that every foreseeable contingency had been exempted from its
provisions. The Senate endorsed the Kellogg-Briand Pact as a statement of
principle while insisting that the treaty had no practical implications, raising the
question whether involving America even in an enunciation of principle was
worth the reservations it would inevitably elicit.
If the United States rejected alliances and was casting doubts on the efficacy
of the League, how was the Versailles system to be safeguarded? Kellogg’s
answer proved far less original than his critique, being that old standby, the force
of public opinion:
…if by this treaty all the nations solemnly pronounce against war as an institution for settling
international disputes, the world will have taken a forward step, created a public opinion, marshaled
the great moral forces of the world for its observance, and entered into a sacred obligation which will
make it far more difficult to plunge the world into another great conflict.11
Four years later, Kellogg’s successor, Henry Stimson, as distinguished and
sophisticated a public servant as America had produced in the entire interwar
period, was not able to advance a better remedy against aggression than the
Kellogg-Briand Pact—backed, of course, by the strength of public opinion:
The Kellogg-Briand Pact provides for no sanctions of force…. Instead it rests upon the sanction of
public opinion which can be made one of the most potent sanctions of the world…. Those critics who
scoff at it have not accurately appraised the evolution in world opinion since the Great War.12
To a distant island power—as the United States stood vis-à-vis Europe and Asia
—the disputes of Europe necessarily appeared abstruse and often irrelevant.
Since America possessed a wide margin of safety to insulate it from challenges
which threatened European countries without affecting American security, the
European countries were in effect functioning as America’s safety valves. A
similar line of reasoning had led to Great Britain’s aloofness from day-to-day
European politics during the period of its “splendid isolation.”
There was, however, a fundamental difference between Great Britain’s
“splendid isolation” of the nineteenth century and America’s isolationism of the
twentieth century. Great Britain, too, had sought to steer clear of Europe’s daily
squabbles. It recognized, however, that its own safety depended on the balance
of power, and it was quite prepared to defend that balance by using the
traditional methods of European diplomacy. In contrast, America never accepted
the importance of either the balance of power or of the European style of
diplomacy. Believing itself blessed by a unique and ultimately superior
dispensation, America simply did not engage itself, and if it did, then only for
general causes and in accordance with its own particular style of diplomacy—
which was vastly more public, more juridical, and ideological than Europe’s.
The interaction of the European and American styles of diplomacy during the
interwar period therefore tended to combine the worst of both approaches.
Feeling threatened, the European countries, especially France and the new
nations of Eastern Europe, did not accept America’s legacy of collective security
and international arbitration, or its juridical definitions of war and peace. The
nations which had become converts to the American agenda, principally Great
Britain, had no experience in conducting policy on that basis. Yet all of these
countries were very well aware that Germany could never have been defeated
without America’s help. Since the end of the war, the balance of power had
become even less favorable toward the wartime Allies. In any new war with
Germany, American help would be needed more urgently, and probably sooner
than it had been the last time, especially since the Soviet Union was no longer a
player.
The practical result of this mixture of fear and hope was that European
diplomacy continued to drift further away from its traditional moorings and
toward greater emotional dependence on America, producing a double veto:
France would not act without Great Britain, and Great Britain would not act
contrary to views strongly held in Washington, never mind that American
leaders never tired of volubly insisting that they would in no circumstance risk
war on behalf of European issues.
America’s consistent refusal throughout the 1920s to commit itself to
safeguarding the Versailles system proved to be terrible psychological
preparation for the 1930s, when international tensions began to erupt. A foretaste
of what lay ahead came in 1931, when Japan invaded Manchuria, separated it
from China, and turned it into a satellite state. The United States condemned
Japan’s actions but refused to participate in collective enforcement. In censuring
Japan, America introduced a sanction of its own, which at the time seemed like
an evasion but which, a decade later, would, in Roosevelt’s hands, turn into a
weapon for forcing a showdown with Japan. This sanction was the policy of
refusing to recognize territorial changes brought about by force. Originated by
Stimson in 1932, it was invoked by Roosevelt in the fall of 1941 to demand that
Japan withdraw from Manchuria and all of its other conquests.
On January 30, 1933, the world crisis began in earnest with Hitler’s accession
to the position of German Chancellor. Destiny had decreed that Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, who did as much as any other individual to lay Hitler low, would take
his oath of office a little more than four weeks later. Still, nothing in Roosevelt’s
first term foreshadowed such an outcome. Roosevelt rarely deviated from the
standard rhetoric of the interwar period and repeated the isolationist themes
handed down by his predecessors. In a speech before the Woodrow Wilson
Foundation on December 28, 1933, Roosevelt addressed the imminent end of the
agreed term of the Naval Treaties of the 1920s. He proposed to extend these
accords by calling for the abolition of all offensive weapons and—harkening
back to Kellogg—by a commitment that no nation permit its military forces to
enter the territory of another.
The subject was as familiar as Roosevelt’s solution to possible violations of
what he was proposing. Once again, the censure of public opinion was invoked
as the only available remedy:
…no such general agreement for the elimination of aggression or the elimination of the weapons of
offensive warfare would be of any value in this world unless every Nation, without exception, would
enter into such an agreement by solemn obligation…. [T]hen, my friends, it would be a
comparatively easy matter to separate the sheep from the goats…. It is but an extension of the
challenge of Woodrow Wilson for us to propose in this newer generation that from now on war by
governments shall be changed to peace by peoples.13
There was no provision for what might happen to the goats once they were
separated from the sheep.
Roosevelt’s proposal was moot by the time it was put forward, since Germany
had left the Disarmament Conference two months earlier and refused to return.
In any event, banning offensive weapons was not on Hitler’s agenda. Nor, as it
turned out, did Hitler suffer global opprobrium for having opted for rearmament.
Roosevelt’s first term coincided with the heyday of revisionism about the First
World War. In 1935, a special Senate Committee under North Dakota’s Senator
Gerald Nye published a 1400-page report blaming America’s entry into the war
on armaments manufacturers. Soon thereafter, Walter Millis’ best-selling book,
The Road to War, popularized the thesis for a mass audience.14 Under the impact
of this school of thought, America’s participation in the war came to be
explained by malfeasance, conspiracy, and betrayal rather than by fundamental
or permanent interests.
To prevent America from once again being lured into war, the Congress
passed three socalled Neutrality Acts between 1935 and 1937. Prompted by the
Nye Report, these laws prohibited loans and any other financial assistance to
belligerents (whatever the cause of war) and imposed an arms embargo on all
parties (regardless of who the victim was). Purchases of nonmilitary goods for
cash were allowed only if they were transported in non-American ships.15 The
Congress was not abjuring profits so much as it was rejecting risks. As the
aggressors bestrode Europe, America abolished the distinction between
aggressor and victim by legislating a single set of restrictions on both.
The national interest came to be defined in legal rather than geostrategic
terms. In March 1936, Secretary of State Hull advised Roosevelt in exclusively
legal terms about the significance of the remilitarization of the Rhineland, which
had toppled the military balance of Europe and left the countries of Eastern
Europe defenseless: “It would appear from this brief analysis that the action of
the German Government has constituted both a violation of the Versailles and
Locarno pacts, but as far as the United States is concerned it does not appear to
constitute a violation of our treaty16 of August 25, 1921 with Germany….”17
After his landslide electoral victory of 1936, Roosevelt went far beyond the
existing framework. In fact, he demonstrated that, though preoccupied with the
Depression, he had grasped the essence of the dictators’ challenge better than
any European leader except Churchill. At first, he sought merely to enunciate
America’s moral commitment to the cause of the democracies. Roosevelt began
this educational process with the socalled Quarantine Speech, which he
delivered in Chicago on October 5, 1937. It was his first warning to America of
the approaching peril, and his first public statement that America might have to
assume some responsibilities with respect to it. Japan’s renewed military
aggression in China, coupled with the previous year’s announcement of the
Berlin-Rome Axis, provided the backdrop, giving Roosevelt’s concerns a global
dimension:
The peace, the freedom and the security of ninety percent of the population of the world is being
jeopardized by the remaining ten percent who are threatening a breakdown of all international order
and law…. It seems to be unfortunately true that the epidemic of world lawlessness is spreading.
When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a
quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the
disease.18
Roosevelt was careful not to spell out what he meant by “quarantine” and what,
if any, specific measures he might have in mind. Had the speech implied any
kind of action, it would have been inconsistent with the Neutrality Acts, which
the Congress had overwhelmingly approved and the President had recently
signed.
Not surprisingly, the Quarantine Speech was attacked by isolationists, who
demanded clarification of the President’s intentions. They argued passionately
that the distinction between “peace-loving” and “warlike” nations implied an
American value judgment which, in turn, would lead to the abandonment of the
policy of nonintervention, to which both Roosevelt and the Congress had
pledged themselves. Two years later, Roosevelt described the uproar that
resulted from the speech as follows: “Unfortunately, this suggestion fell upon
deaf ears—even hostile and resentful ears…. It was hailed as war mongering; it
was condemned as attempted intervention in foreign affairs; it was even
ridiculed as a nervous search ‘under the bed’ for dangers of war which did not
exist.”19
Roosevelt could have ended the controversy by simply denying the intentions
being ascribed to him. Yet, despite the critical onslaught, Roosevelt spoke
ambiguously enough at a news conference to keep open the option of collective
defense of some kind. According to the journalistic practice of the day, the
President always met with the press off-the-record, which meant that he could
neither be quoted nor identified, and these rules were respected.
Years later, the historian Charles Beard published a transcript showing
Roosevelt dodging and weaving but never denying that the Quarantine Speech
represented a new approach, while refusing to say just what the new approach
was.20 Roosevelt insisted that his speech implied actions that went beyond moral
condemnation of aggression: “There are a lot of methods in the world that have
never been tried yet.”21 Asked whether this meant that he had a plan, Roosevelt
replied, “I can’t give you any clue to it. You will have to invent one. I have got
one.”22 He never explained what that plan was.
Roosevelt the statesman might warn against the impending danger; Roosevelt
the political leader had to navigate among three currents of American opinion: a
small group advocating unambiguous support for all “peace-loving” nations; a
somewhat more significant group that went along with such support as long as it
stopped well short of war; and a vast majority supporting the letter and the spirit
of the neutrality legislation. A skillful political leader will always try to keep
open as many options as possible. He will want to present his ultimate course as
his own optimum choice rather than as having been imposed by events. And no
modern American president was better at this kind of tactical management than
Roosevelt.
In a Fireside Chat devoted mostly to domestic issues on October 12, 1937—a
week after the Quarantine Speech—Roosevelt tried to satisfy all three groups.
Underlining his commitment to peace, he spoke approvingly of a forthcoming
conference of the signatories of the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 and
described American participation in it as a demonstration of “our purpose to
cooperate with the other signatories to this Treaty, including China and Japan.”23
The conciliatory language suggested a desire for peace, even with Japan; at the
same time, it would serve as a demonstration of good faith if cooperation with
Japan should prove impossible. Roosevelt was equally ambiguous about
America’s international role. He reminded his audience of his own wartime
experience as Assistant Secretary of the Navy: “…remember[ing] that from 1913
to 1921, I personally was fairly close to world events, and in that period, while I
learned much of what to do, I also learned much of what not to do.”24
Roosevelt surely would not have objected if his audience had interpreted this
ambiguous statement to mean that his wartime experiences had taught him the
importance of nonentanglement. On the other hand, if that was in fact what
Roosevelt meant, he would have gained far more popularity had he simply said
so. In the light of his later actions, it is more likely that Roosevelt meant to
suggest that he would pursue the Wilsonian tradition by means of more realistic
methods.
Despite the hostile reaction to his pronouncements, Roosevelt told Colonel
Edward House, Wilson’s erstwhile confidant, in October 1937, that it would take
time to “make people realize that war will be a greater danger to us if we close
all doors and windows than if we go out in the street and use our influence to
curb the riot.”25 It was another way of saying that the United States would need
to participate in international affairs in an as yet unspecified way to help quell
the pattern of aggression.
Roosevelt’s immediate problem was an outburst of pro-isolationist sentiment.
In January 1938, the House of Representatives nearly passed a constitutional
amendment requiring a national referendum for declarations of war except in the
event of an invasion of the United States. Roosevelt had to make a personal
appeal to prevent its passage. In these circumstances, Roosevelt viewed
discretion as the better part of valor. In March 1938, the United States
government did not react to Austria’s Anschluss to Germany, following the
pattern of the European democracies, which had confined themselves to
perfunctory protests. During the crisis leading to the Munich Conference,
Roosevelt felt obliged to emphasize repeatedly that America would not join a
united front against Hitler. And he disavowed subordinates and even close
friends who so much as hinted at that possibility.
In early September 1938, at a dinner celebrating Franco-American relations,
the American Ambassador to France, William C. Bullitt, repeated a standard
platitude—that France and the United States were “united in war and peace.”26
This was enough to trigger an isolationist uproar. Roosevelt, who could not have
known of Bullitt’s comments in advance since they were the sort of boilerplate
rhetoric left to the discretion of ambassadors, nevertheless took pains to reject
the insinuation that the United States was aligning itself with the democracies as
being “100 percent wrong.”27 Later that month, when war seemed imminent and
after Chamberlain had already met with Hitler twice, Roosevelt sent
Chamberlain two messages, on September 26 and 28, urging a conference of the
interested powers that, in the existing circumstances, could only magnify
pressures for major Czech concessions.
Munich seems to have been the turning point which impelled Roosevelt to
align America with the European democracies, at first politically but gradually
materially as well. From then on, his commitment to thwarting the dictators was
inexorable, culminating three years later in America’s entry into a second world
war. The interplay between leaders and their publics in a democracy is always
complex. A leader who confines himself to the experience of his people in a
period of upheaval purchases temporary popularity at the price of condemnation
by posterity, whose claims he is neglecting. A leader who gets too far ahead of
his society will become irrelevant. A great leader must be an educator, bridging
the gap between his visions and the familiar. But he must also be willing to walk
alone to enable his society to follow the path he has selected.
There is inevitably in every great leader an element of guile which simplifies,
sometimes the objectives, sometimes the magnitude, of the task. But his ultimate
test is whether he incarnates the truth of his society’s values and the essence of
its challenges. These qualities Roosevelt possessed to an unusual degree. He
deeply believed in America; he was convinced that Nazism was both evil and a
threat to American security, and he was extraordinarily guileful. And he was
prepared to shoulder the burden of lonely decisions. Like a tightrope walker, he
had to move, step by careful, anguishing step, across the chasm between his goal
and his society’s reality in demonstrating to it that the far shore was in fact safer
than the familiar promontory.
On October 26, 1938, less than four weeks after the Munich Pact, Roosevelt
returned to the theme of his Quarantine Speech. In a radio address to the HeraldTribune Forum, he warned against unnamed but easily identifiable aggressors
whose “national policy adopts as a deliberate instrument the threat of war.”28
Next, while upholding disarmament in principle, Roosevelt also called for
strengthening America’s defenses:
…we have consistently pointed out that neither we, nor any nation, will accept disarmament while
neighbor nations arm to the teeth. If there is not general disarmament, we ourselves must continue to
arm. It is a step we do not like to take, and do not wish to take. But, until there is general
abandonment of weapons capable of aggression, ordinary rules of national prudence and common
sense require that we be prepared.29
In secret, Roosevelt went much further. At the end of October 1938, in separate
conversations with the British air minister and also with a personal friend of
Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, he put forward a project designed to
circumvent the Neutrality Acts. Proposing an outright evasion of legislation he
had only recently signed, Roosevelt suggested setting up British and French
airplane-assembly plants in Canada, near the American border. The United
States would supply all the components, leaving only the final assembly to Great
Britain and France. This arrangement would technically permit the project to
stay within the letter of the Neutrality Acts, presumably on the ground that the
component parts were civilian goods. Roosevelt told Chamberlain’s emissary
that, “in the event of war with the dictators, he had the industrial resources of the
American nation behind him.”30
Roosevelt’s scheme for helping the democracies restore their air power
collapsed, as it was bound to, if only because of the sheer logistical impossibility
of undertaking an effort on such a scale in secret. But from then on, Roosevelt’s
support for Britain and France was limited only when the Congress and public
opinion could neither be circumvented nor overcome.
In early 1939, in his State of the Union message, Roosevelt identified the
aggressor nations as being Italy, Germany, and Japan. Alluding to the theme of
his Quarantine Speech, he pointed out that “there are many methods short of
war, but stronger and more effective than mere words, of bringing home to
aggressor governments the aggregate sentiments of our own people.”31
In April 1939, within a month of the Nazi occupation of Prague, Roosevelt for
the first time designated aggression against smaller countries as constituting a
general threat to American security. At a press conference on April 8, 1939,
Roosevelt told reporters that “the continued political, economic and social
independence of every small nation in the world does have an effect on our
national safety and prosperity. Each one that disappears weakens our national
safety and prosperity.”32 In a speech before the Pan American Union on April
14, he went a step further by arguing that the United States’ security interests
could no longer be limited to the Monroe Doctrine:
Beyond question, within a scant few years air fleets will cross the ocean as easily as today they cross
the closed European seas. Economic functioning of the world becomes therefore necessarily a unit;
no interruption of it anywhere can fail, in the future, to disrupt economic life everywhere.
The past generation in Pan American matters was concerned with constructing the principles and
the mechanisms through which this hemisphere would work together. But the next generation will be
concerned with the methods by which the New World can live together in peace with the Old.33
In April 1939, Roosevelt addressed Hitler and Mussolini directly in a message
which, though ridiculed by the dictators, had been cleverly designed to
demonstrate to the American people that the Axis countries indeed had
aggressive designs. Surely one of America’s subtlest and most devious
presidents, Roosevelt asked the dictators—but not Great Britain or France—for
assurances that they would not attack some thirty-one specific European and
Asian nations for a period of ten years.34 Roosevelt then undertook to obtain
similar assurances from those thirty-one nations with respect to Germany and
Italy. Finally, he offered America’s participation in any disarmament conference
resulting from a relaxation of tensions.
Roosevelt’s note will not go down in diplomatic history for meticulous staff
work. For instance, Syria and Palestine, French and British mandates
respectively, were listed as independent states.35 Hitler had a grand time using
Roosevelt’s message as a prop in one of his Reichstag speeches. To general
hilarity, Hitler slowly read the long list of countries which Roosevelt was
imploring him to leave alone. As the Führer pronounced the names of country
after country in a bemused tone of voice, peals of laughter echoed through the
Reichstag. Hitler proceeded to inquire of each of the countries listed in
Roosevelt’s note, many of which were already quaking before him, whether they
indeed felt menaced. They, of course, strenuously denied any such concern.
Though Hitler scored the oratorical point, Roosevelt achieved his political
objective. By asking only Hitler and Mussolini for assurances, he had
stigmatized them as the aggressors before the only audience that, for the
moment, mattered to Roosevelt—the American people. To enlist the American
public in supporting the democracies, Roosevelt needed to frame the issues in
terms that went beyond the balance of power and to portray them as a struggle in
defense of innocent victims against an evil aggressor. Both his note and Hitler’s
reaction to it helped him to achieve that objective.
Roosevelt was quick to translate America’s new psychological threshold into
strategic coin. During the same month, April 1939, he inched the United States
closer to de facto military cooperation with Great Britain. An agreement between
the two countries freed the Royal Navy to concentrate all of its forces in the
Atlantic while the United States moved the bulk of its fleet to the Pacific. This
division of labor implied that the United States assumed responsibility for the
defense of Great Britain’s Asian possessions against Japan. Prior to World War I,
an analogous arrangement between Great Britain and France (which had led to
the concentration of the French fleet in the Mediterranean) had been used as an
argument that Great Britain was morally obliged to enter World War I in defense
of France’s Atlantic coast.
Isolationists observing Roosevelt’s actions were deeply disturbed. In February
1939, before the outbreak of the war, Senator Arthur Vandenberg had eloquently
put forward the isolationist case:
True, we do live in a foreshortened world in which, compared with Washington’s day, time and space
are relatively annihilated. But I still thank God for two insulating oceans; and even though they be
foreshortened, they are still our supreme benediction if they be widely and prudently used….
We all have our sympathies and our natural emotions in behalf of the victims of national or
international outrage all around the globe; but we are not, we cannot be, the world’s protector or the
world’s policeman.36
When, in response to the German invasion of Poland, Great Britain declared war
on September 3, 1939, Roosevelt had no choice but to invoke the Neutrality
Acts. At the same time, he moved rapidly to modify the legislation to permit
Great Britain and France to purchase American arms.
Roosevelt had avoided invoking the Neutrality Acts in the war between Japan
and China, ostensibly because no war had been declared, in reality because he
believed that an arms embargo would hurt China far more than it would Japan.
But if war broke out in Europe, it would be formally declared and he would not
be able to resort to subterfuge to circumvent the Neutrality Acts. Therefore, in
early 1939, Roosevelt called for a revision of the Neutrality Acts on the ground
that they “may operate unevenly and unfairly—and may actually give aid to the
aggressor and deny it to the victim.”37 The Congress did not act until after the
European war had actually started. Indicating the strength of the isolationist
mood, Roosevelt’s proposal had been defeated three times in the Congress
earlier in the year.
The same day that Great Britain declared war, Roosevelt called a special
session of the Congress for September 21. This time, he prevailed. The socalled
Fourth Neutrality Act of November 4, 1939, permitted belligerents to purchase
arms and ammunition from the United States, provided they paid in cash and
transported their purchases in their own or neutral ships. Since, because of the
British blockade, only Great Britain and France were in a position to do so,
“neutrality” was becoming an increasingly technical term. The Neutrality Acts
had lasted only as long as there had been nothing to be neutral about.
During the socalled phony war, America’s leaders continued to believe that
only material aid was required of them. Conventional wisdom had it that the
French army, behind the Maginot Line, and backed by the Royal Navy, would
strangle Germany through the combination of a defensive ground war and a
naval blockade.
In February 1940, Roosevelt sent Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles on a
mission to Europe to explore the possibilities of peace during the “phony war.”
French Prime Minister Daladier inferred that Welles was urging a compromise
peace that left Germany in control of Central Europe, though the majority of
Welles’ interlocutors did not interpret his remarks that way and, for Daladier, the
wish may have been father to the thought.38 Roosevelt’s purpose in sending
Welles to Europe had been not to mediate so much as to demonstrate his
commitment to peace to his isolationist people. He also wanted to establish
America’s claim to participation should the “phony war” culminate in a peace
settlement. Germany’s assault on Norway a few weeks later put an end to that
particular mission.
On June 10, 1940, as France was falling to the Nazi invaders, Roosevelt
abandoned formal neutrality and came down eloquently on the side of Great
Britain. In a powerful speech in Charlottesville, Virginia, he combined a scathing
denunciation of Mussolini, whose armies had attacked France that day, with
America’s commitment to extend all-out material aid to every country resisting
German aggression. At the same time, he proclaimed that America would
increase its own defenses:
On this tenth day of June, 1940, in this University founded by the first great American teacher of
democracy, we send forth our prayers and our hopes to those beyond the seas who are maintaining
with magnificent valor their battle for freedom.
In our American unity, we will pursue two obvious and simultaneous courses; we will extend to
the opponents of force the material resources of this nation; and, at the same time, we will harness
and speed up the use of those resources in order that we ourselves in the Americas may have
equipment and training equal to the task of any emergency and every defense.39
Roosevelt’s Charlottesville speech marked a watershed. Faced with Great
Britain’s imminent defeat, any American president might have discovered in the
Royal Navy an essential component to the security of the Western Hemisphere.
But it is difficult to imagine any contemporary of Roosevelt—of either political
party—who, having had the courage and foresight to recognize the challenge,
would have had the willpower to lead his isolationist people, step by step,
toward the commitment to do whatever was necessary to defeat Nazi Germany.
The expectation thus raised that America would, sooner or later, become Great
Britain’s ally was surely one of the most decisive elements in sustaining
Churchill’s decision to continue to fight alone:
We shall go on to the end…. And even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large
part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the
British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its
power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old.40
Roosevelt’s methods were complex—elevated in their statement of objectives,
devious in tactic, explicit in defining the issues, and less than frank in explaining
the intricacies of particular events. Many of Roosevelt’s actions were on the
fringes of constitutionality. No contemporary president could resort to
Roosevelt’s methods and remain in office. Yet Roosevelt had clearly seen that
America’s margin of safety was shrinking and that a victory of the Axis Powers
would eliminate it. Above all, he found Hitler to be anathema to all the values
for which America had historically stood.
After the fall of France, Roosevelt increasingly stressed the imminent threat to
American security. To Roosevelt, the Atlantic was possessed of the same
meaning which the English Channel held for British statesmen. He saw it as a
vital national interest that it not be dominated by Hitler. Thus, in his State of the
Union Address of January 6, 1941, Roosevelt linked American security to the
survival of the Royal Navy:
I have recently pointed out how quickly the tempo of modern warfare could bring into our very midst
the physical attack which we must eventually expect if the dictator nations win the war.
There is much loose talk of our immunity from immediate and direct invasion from across the
seas. Obviously, as long as the British Navy retains its powers, no such danger exists.41
Of course, if that were true, America was obliged to make every effort to prevent
Great Britain’s defeat—in the extreme case, even to enter the war itself.
Roosevelt had for many months been acting on the premise that America
might have to enter the war. In September 1940, he had devised an ingenious
arrangement to give Great Britain fifty allegedly over-age destroyers in
exchange for the right to set up American bases on eight British possessions,
from Newfoundland to the South American mainland. Winston Churchill later
called it a “decidedly unneutral act,” for the destroyers were far more important
to Great Britain than the bases were to America. Most of them were quite remote
from any conceivable theater of operations, and some even duplicated existing
American bases. More than anything, the destroyer deal represented a pretext
based on a legal opinion by Roosevelt’s own appointee, Attorney General
Francis Biddle—hardly an objective observer.
Roosevelt sought neither Congressional approval nor modification of the
Neutrality Acts for his destroyer-for-bases deal. Nor was he challenged, as
inconceivable as that seems in the light of contemporary practice. It was the
measure of Roosevelt’s concern about a possible Nazi victory and of his
commitment to bolstering British morale, that he took this step as a presidential
election campaign was just beginning. (It was fortunate for Great Britain and for
the cause of American unity that the foreign policy views of his opponent,
Wendell Willkie, were not significantly different from Roosevelt’s.)
Concurrently, Roosevelt vastly increased the American defense budget and, in
1940, induced the Congress to introduce peacetime conscription. So strong was
lingering isolationist sentiment that conscription was renewed by only one vote
in the House of Representatives in the summer of 1941, less than four months
before the outbreak of the war.
Immediately after the election, Roosevelt moved to eliminate the requirement
of the Fourth Neutrality Act—that American war materials could only be
purchased for cash. In a Fireside Chat, borrowing a term from Wilson, he
challenged the United States to become the “arsenal of democracy.”42 The legal
instrument for bringing this about was the Lend-Lease Act, which gave the
President discretionary authority to lend, lease, sell, or barter under any terms he
deemed proper any defense article to “the government of any country whose
defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States.” Secretary
of State Hull, normally a passionate Wilsonian and an advocate of collective
security, rather uncharacteristically justified the Lend-Lease Act on strategic
grounds. Without massive American help, he argued, Great Britain would fall
and control of the Atlantic would pass into hostile hands, jeopardizing the
security of the Western Hemisphere.43
Yet, if this were true, America could avoid participation in the war only if
Great Britain were by itself able to overcome Hitler, which even Churchill did
not believe was possible. Senator Taft stressed this point in his opposition to
Lend-Lease. The isolationists organized themselves as the socalled America
First Committee, headed by General Robert E. Wood, Chairman of the board of
Sears, Roebuck and Company, and supported by prominent leaders in many
fields, among them Kathleen Norris, Irvin S. Cobb, Charles A. Lindbergh, Henry
Ford, General Hugh S. Johnson, Chester Bowles, and Theodore Roosevelt’s
daughter, Mrs. Nicholas Longworth.
The passion behind the isolationists’ opposition to Lend-Lease was captured
in a comment by Senator Arthur Vandenberg, one of their most thoughtful
spokesmen, on March 11, 1941: “We have tossed Washington’s Farewell
Address into the discard. We have thrown ourselves squarely into the power
politics and the power wars of Europe, Asia and Africa. We have taken the first
step upon a course from which we can never hereafter retreat.”44 Vandenberg’s
analysis was correct, but it was the world that had imposed the necessity; and it
was Roosevelt’s merit to have recognized it.
After proposing Lend-Lease, Roosevelt made his determination to bring about
the defeat of the Nazis more explicit with every passing month. Even before the
Act was passed, the British and American chiefs of staff, anticipating its
approval, met to organize the resources about to be made available. While
together, they also began planning for the time when the United States would be
an active participant in the war. For these planners, only the timing of America’s
entry into the war remained yet to be settled. Roosevelt did not initial the
socalled ABC-1 Agreement, according to which, in case of war, top priority
would be given to the struggle against Germany. But it was clear that this was
due to domestic imperatives and constitutional restrictions, not to any ambiguity
about his purposes.
Nazi atrocities increasingly eroded the distinction between fighting to promote
American values and fighting to defend American security. Hitler had gone so
far beyond any acceptable norm of morality that the battle against him
assimilated the triumph of good over evil into the struggle for naked survival.
Thus, in January 1941, Roosevelt summed up America’s objectives in what he
called the Four Freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom
from want, and freedom from fear. These goals went far beyond those of any
previous European war. Not even Wilson had proclaimed a social issue like
freedom from want as a war aim.
In April 1941, Roosevelt took another step toward war by authorizing an
agreement with the Danish representative in Washington (whose rank was
minister) to allow American forces to occupy Greenland. Since Denmark was
under German occupation and since no Danish government-in-exile had been
formed, the diplomat without a country took it upon himself to “authorize”
American bases on Danish soil. At the same time, Roosevelt privately informed
Churchill that, henceforth, American ships would patrol the North Atlantic west
of Iceland—covering about two-thirds of the entire ocean—and “publish the
position of possible aggressor ships or planes when located in the American
patrol area.”45 Three months later, at the invitation of the local government,
American troops landed in Iceland, another Danish possession, to replace British
forces. Then, without Congressional approval, Roosevelt declared the whole area
between these Danish possessions and North America a part of the Western
Hemisphere Defense system.
In a lengthy radio address on May 27, 1941, Roosevelt announced a state of
emergency and restated America’s commitment to social and economic progress:
We will not accept a Hitler-dominated world. And we will not accept a world, like the postwar world
of the 1920s, in which the seeds of Hitlerism can again be planted and allowed to grow.
We will accept only a world consecrated to freedom of speech and expression—freedom of every
person to worship God in his own way—freedom from want—and freedom from terror.46
The phrase “will not accept” had to mean that Roosevelt was in effect
committing America to go to war for the Four Freedoms if they could not be
achieved in any other way.
Few American presidents have been as sensitive and perspicacious as Franklin
Delano Roosevelt was in his grasp of the psychology of his people. Roosevelt
understood that only a threat to their security could motivate them to support
military preparedness. But to take them into a war, he knew he needed to appeal
to their idealism in much the same way that Wilson had. In Roosevelt’s view,
America’s security needs might well be met by control of the Atlantic, but its
war aims required some vision of a new world order. Thus “balance of power”
was not a term ever found in Roosevelt’s pronouncements, except when he used
it disparagingly. What he sought was to bring about a world community
compatible with America’s democratic and social ideals as the best guarantee of
peace.
In this atmosphere, the president of a technically neutral United States and
Great Britain’s quintessential wartime leader, Winston Churchill, met in August
1941 on a cruiser off the coast of Newfoundland. Great Britain’s position had
improved somewhat when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June, but England
was far from assured of victory. Nevertheless, the joint statement these two
leaders issued reflected not a statement of traditional war aims but the design of
a totally new world bearing America’s imprimatur. The Atlantic Charter
proclaimed a set of “common principles” on which the President and Prime
Minister based “their hopes for a better future for the world.”47 These principles
enlarged upon Roosevelt’s original Four Freedoms by incorporating equal access
to raw materials and cooperative efforts to improve social conditions around the
world.
The Atlantic Charter cast the problem of postwar security entirely in
Wilsonian terms and contained no geopolitical component at all. “After the final
destruction of the Nazi tyranny,” the free nations would renounce the use of
force and impose permanent disarmament on the nations “which threaten…
aggression.” This would lead to the encouragement of “all other practicable
measures which will lighten for peace-loving peoples the crushing burden of
armaments.”48 Two categories of nations were being envisaged: aggressor
nations (specifically Germany, Japan, and Italy), which would be permanently
disarmed, and “peace-loving countries,” which would be permitted to retain
military forces, though, it was hoped, at greatly reduced levels. National selfdetermination would serve as the cornerstone of this new world order.
The difference between the Atlantic Charter and the Pitt Plan, by which Great
Britain had proposed to end the Napoleonic Wars, showed the extent to which
Great Britain had become the junior partner in the Anglo-American relationship.
Not once did the Atlantic Charter refer to a new balance of power, whereas the
Pitt Plan had purported to be about nothing else. It was not that Great Britain had
become oblivious to the balance of power after just having fought the most
desperate war in its long history; rather, Churchill had realized that America’s
entry into the war would of itself alter the balance of power in Great Britain’s
favor. In the meantime, he had to subordinate long-term British objectives to
immediate necessities—something Great Britain had never felt obliged to do
during the Napoleonic Wars.
When the Atlantic Charter was proclaimed, German armies were approaching
Moscow and Japanese forces were preparing to move into Southeast Asia.
Churchill was above all concerned with removing the obstacles to America’s
participation in the war. For he understood very well that, by itself, Great Britain
would not be able to achieve a decisive victory, even with Soviet participation in
the war and American material support. In addition, the Soviet Union might
collapse and some compromise between Hitler and Stalin was always a
possibility, threatening Great Britain with renewed isolation. Churchill saw no
point in debating postwar structure before he could even be certain that there
would be one.
In September 1941, the United States crossed the line into belligerency.
Roosevelt’s order that the position of German submarines be reported to the
British Navy had made it inevitable that, sooner or later, some clash would
occur. On September 4, 1941, the American destroyer Greer was torpedoed
while signaling the location of a German submarine to British airplanes. On
September 11, without describing the circumstances, Roosevelt denounced
German “piracy.” Comparing German submarines to a rattlesnake coiled to
strike, he ordered the United States Navy to sink “on sight” any German or
Italian submarines discovered in the previously established American defense
area extending all the way to Iceland. To all practical purposes, America was at
war on the sea with the Axis powers.49
Simultaneously, Roosevelt took up the challenge of Japan. In response to
Japan’s occupation of Indochina in July 1941, he abrogated America’s
commercial treaty with Japan, forbade the sale of scrap metal to it, and
encouraged the Dutch government-in-exile to stop oil exports to Japan from the
Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia). These pressures led to negotiations
with Japan, which began in October 1941. Roosevelt instructed the American
negotiators to demand that Japan relinquish all of its conquests, including
Manchuria, by invoking America’s previous refusal to “recognize” these acts.
Roosevelt must have known that there was no possibility that Japan would
accept. On December 7, 1941, following the pattern of the Russo-Japanese War,
Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and destroyed a significant part
of America’s Pacific fleet. On December 11, Hitler, who had joined a tripartite
treaty with Japan and Italy, declared war on the United States. Why Hitler thus
freed Roosevelt to concentrate America’s war effort on the country Roosevelt
had always considered to be the principal enemy has never been satisfactorily
explained.
America’s entry into the war marked the culmination of a great and daring
leader’s extraordinary diplomatic enterprise. In less than three years, Roosevelt
had taken his staunchly isolationist people into a global war. As late as May
1940, 64 percent of Americans had considered the preservation of peace more
important than the defeat of the Nazis. Eighteen months later, in December 1941,
just before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the proportions had been reversed—only
32 percent favored peace over preventing triumph.50
Roosevelt had achieved his goal patiently and inexorably, educating his people
one step at a time about the necessities before them. His audiences filtered his
words through their own preconceptions and did not always understand that his
ultimate destination was war, though they could not have doubted that it was
confrontation. In fact, Roosevelt was not so much bent on war as on defeating
the Nazis; it was simply that, as time passed, the Nazis could only be defeated if
America entered the war.
That their entry into the war should have seemed so sudden to the American
people was due to three factors: Americans had had no experience with going to
war for security concerns outside the Western Hemisphere; many believed that
the European democracies could prevail on their own, while few understood the
nature of the diplomacy that had preceded Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor or
Hitler’s rash declaration of war on the United States. It was a measure of the
United States’ deep-seated isolationism that it had to be bombed at Pearl Harbor
before it would enter the war in the Pacific; and that, in Europe, it was Hitler
who would ultimately declare war on the United States rather than the other way
around.
By initiating hostilities, the Axis powers had solved Roosevelt’s lingering
dilemma about how to move the American people into the war. Had Japan
focused its attack on Southeast Asia and Hitler not declared war against the
United States, Roosevelt’s task of steering his people toward his views would
have been much more complicated. In light of Roosevelt’s proclaimed moral and
strategic convictions, there can be little doubt that, in the end, he would have
somehow managed to enlist America in the struggle he considered so decisive to
both the future of freedom and to American security.
Subsequent generations of Americans have placed a greater premium on total
candor by their chief executive. Yet, like Lincoln, Roosevelt sensed that the
survival of his country and its values was at stake, and that history itself would
hold him responsible for the results of his solitary initiatives. And, as was the
case with Lincoln, it is a measure of the debt free peoples owe to Franklin
Delano Roosevelt that the wisdom of his solitary passage is now, quite simply,
taken for granted.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Three Approaches to Peace: Roosevelt, Stalin,
and Churchill in World War II
When he attacked the Soviet Union, Hitler launched the most massive land
war in the history of mankind. The horror of that war was unprecedented even in
comparison to the barbarity attending previous European conflicts. It was a
genocidal struggle to the finish. As German armies thrashed their way deep into
Russia, Hitler declared war on the United States, turning what had been a
European war into a global struggle. The German army ravaged Russia, but was
unable to score a knockout blow. In the winter of 1941, it was stopped at the
outskirts of Moscow. Then, in the winter of 1942–43, the German offensive, this
time aimed at southern Russia, ground to a halt. In a vicious battle in frozen
Stalingrad, Hitler lost the entire Sixth Army. The back of the German war effort
was broken. The Allied leaders—Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin—could now
begin to think about victory, and the future shape of the world.
Each of the victors was speaking in terms of his own nation’s historical
experiences. Churchill wanted to reconstruct the traditional balance of power in
Europe. This meant rebuilding Great Britain, France, and even defeated
Germany so that, along with the United States, these countries could
counterbalance the Soviet colossus to the east. Roosevelt envisioned a postwar
order in which the three victors, along with China, would act as a board of
directors of the world, enforcing the peace against any potential miscreant,
which he thought would most likely be Germany—a vision that was to become
known as the “Four Policemen.” Stalin’s approach reflected both his communist
ideology and traditional Russian foreign policy. He strove to cash in on his
country’s victory by extending Russian influence into Central Europe. And he
intended to turn the countries conquered by Soviet armies into buffer zones to
protect Russia against any future German aggression.
Roosevelt had been far ahead of his people when he discerned that a Hitler
victory would jeopardize American security. But he was at one with his people
in rejecting the traditional world of European diplomacy. When he insisted that a
Nazi victory would threaten America, he did not mean to enlist America on
behalf of restoring the European balance of power. To Roosevelt, the purpose of
the war was to remove Hitler as the obstacle to a cooperative international order
based on harmony, not on equilibrium.
Roosevelt was therefore impatient with truisms claiming to embody the
lessons of history. He rejected the idea that a total defeat of Germany might
create a vacuum, which a victorious Soviet Union might then try to fill. He
refused to countenance safeguards against possible postwar rivalry among the
victors, because these implied the reestablishment of the balance of power,
which he in fact wanted to destroy. Peace would be preserved by a system of
collective security maintained by the wartime Allies acting in concert and
sustained by mutual goodwill and vigilance.
Since there would be no equilibrium to maintain but a state of universal peace,
Roosevelt determined that, after the defeat of Nazi Germany, the United States
should call its military forces back home. Roosevelt had no intention of
permanently stationing American forces in Europe, even less of doing so in
order to counterbalance the Soviets, which, in his view, the American public
would never countenance. On February 29, 1944, before American troops ever
set foot in France, he wrote to Churchill:
Do please don’t ask me to keep any American forces in France. I just cannot do it! I would have to
bring them all back home. As I suggested before, I denounce and protest the paternity of Belgium,
France and Italy. You really ought to bring up and discipline your own children. In view of the fact
that they may be your bulwark in future days, you should at least pay for their schooling now!1
In other words, Great Britain would have to defend Europe without any help
from America.
In the same spirit, Roosevelt rejected any American responsibility for the
economic reconstruction of Europe:
I do not want the United States to have the postwar burden of reconstituting France, Italy and the
Balkans. This is not our natural task at a distance of 3,500 miles or more. It is definitely a British task
in which the British are far more vitally interested than we are.2
Roosevelt vastly overestimated the postwar capacities of Great Britain by asking
it to handle simultaneously the defense and the reconstruction of Europe. Great
Britain’s position in this scheme was all the more overblown because of
Roosevelt’s deep disdain for France. In February 1945 at Yalta, the most
important conference among the victors, Roosevelt chided Churchill in Stalin’s
presence for “artificially” trying to build France into a strong power. As if the
absurdity of such an endeavor required no elaboration, he mocked Churchill’s
motive, which he described as an effort to establish a defense line along France’s
eastern border, behind which Great Britain would then be able to assemble its
army.3 At that time, this happened to be the only conceivable means of opposing
Soviet expansionism.
Without being prepared to undertake a permanent American role, Roosevelt
wanted the victorious Allies to supervise the disarming and partitioning of
Germany and to subject various other countries to their control (amazingly,
Roosevelt included France in the category of countries to be controlled). As
early as the spring of 1942, on the occasion of a visit by Soviet Foreign Minister
Molotov to Washington, Roosevelt sketched his idea of the “Four Policemen” to
enforce peace in the postwar world. Harry Hopkins reported the President’s
thinking in a letter to Churchill:
Roosevelt had spoken to Molotov of a system allowing only the great powers—Great Britain, the
United States, the Soviet Union, and possibly China—to have arms. These “policemen” would work
together to preserve the peace.4
Finally, Roosevelt was determined to put an end to the British and French
colonial empires:
When we’ve won the war, I will work with all my might and main to see to it that the United States is
not wheedled into the position of accepting any plan that will further France’s imperialistic
ambitions, or that will aid or abet the British Empire in its imperial ambitions.5
Roosevelt’s policy was a heady mixture of traditional American exceptionalism,
Wilsonian idealism, and Roosevelt’s own canny insight into the American
psyche, which had always been more attuned to universal causes than to
calculations of rewards and penalties. Churchill had succeeded too well in
fostering the illusion that Great Britain was still a great power capable of
resisting Soviet expansionism on its own. For only such a conviction can explain
Roosevelt’s advocacy of a world order based on American troop withdrawals
from overseas, a disarmed Germany, a France reduced to second-class status,
and a Soviet Union left with a huge vacuum opening up before it. The postwar
period thus turned into an exercise for teaching America just how essential it
was to the new balance of power.
Roosevelt’s scheme of the Four Policemen to bring about and guarantee
global peace represented a compromise between Churchill’s traditional balanceof-power approach and the unconstrained Wilsonianism of Roosevelt’s advisers
as epitomized by Secretary of State Cordell Hull. Roosevelt was determined to
avoid the failings of the League of Nations and the system which had been
established in the wake of the First World War. He wanted some form of
collective security, but knew from the experience of the 1920s that collective
security required enforcers, and this was to be the role of the Four Policemen.
Roosevelt’s concept of the Four Policemen was in fact structurally similar to
Metternich’s Holy Alliance, though American liberals would be horrified at such
a thought. Each system represented an attempt to preserve the peace through a
coalition of victors upholding shared values. Metternich’s system had worked
because it had protected a genuine balance of power, the key countries of which
had in fact shared common values, and Russia, though at times disruptive, had
more or less cooperated. Roosevelt’s concept could not be implemented because
no real balance of power emerged from the war, because there was a profound
ideological gulf between the victors, and because Stalin, once free of the threat
of Germany, had no inhibition about pursuing Soviet ideological and political
interests even at the price of confrontation with his erstwhile Allies.
Roosevelt made no provision for what might happen if one of the proposed
Policemen refused to play the role assigned to it—especially if that Policeman
turned out to be the Soviet Union. For, in that case, the despised balance of
power would have to be reconstructed after all. And the more thoroughly the
elements of traditional equilibrium were jettisoned, the more herculean the task
of creating a new balance of power would become.
Had he searched the world, Roosevelt could not have found an interlocutor
more different from himself than Stalin. Whereas Roosevelt wanted to
implement the Wilsonian concept of international harmony, Stalin’s ideas about
the conduct of foreign policy were strictly those of Old World Realpolitik. When
an American general at the Potsdam Conference tried to flatter Stalin by
observing how gratifying it had to be to see Russian armies in Berlin, Stalin
replied tartly, “Tsar Alexander I reached Paris.”
Stalin defined the requirements of peace in the same way that Russian
statesmen had for centuries—as the widest possible security belt around the
Soviet Union’s vast periphery. He welcomed Roosevelt’s emphasis on
unconditional surrender because it would eliminate the Axis Powers as factors in
a peace settlement and prevent the emergence of the German equivalent of
Talleyrand at a peace conference.
Ideology reinforced tradition. As a communist, Stalin refused to make any
distinction between democratic and fascist nations, though he no doubt
considered the democracies less ruthless and perhaps less formidable as well.
Stalin possessed no conceptual apparatus to enable him to forgo territory on
behalf of goodwill, or “objective” reality for the mood of the moment.
Therefore, he was bound to propose to his democratic Allies the same
arrangements that he had asked of Hitler a year earlier. Cooperation with Hitler
had made him no more sympathetic to Nazism than his subsequent alliance with
the democracies impelled him to appreciate the virtues of free institutions. He
would take from each temporary partner whatever was possible through
diplomacy, and seize by force whatever had not been granted to him freely—as
long as he could do so without risking war. His lodestar remained the Soviet
national interest as refracted through the prism of communist ideology. To
paraphrase Palmerston, he had no friends, only interests.
Stalin had proved most ready to negotiate postwar aims when his military
position was the most difficult. With the knife literally at his throat, he attempted
to do so in December 1941, when Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden visited
Moscow, and again in May 1942, when he sent Molotov to London and then to
Washington. These efforts were thwarted, however, because Roosevelt was
passionately opposed to any detailed discussion of peace aims. After the battle of
Stalingrad, Stalin became increasingly certain that the war would end with the
Soviet Union in possession of most of the territories likely to be in dispute.
Having less and less to gain from negotiations, Stalin entrusted the shape of the
postwar world to the reach of his armies.
Churchill would have been quite prepared to enter a negotiation with Stalin
about the postwar European order before Stalin was ever in a position to seize
his prizes. After all, expansionist allies like Stalin had been encountered and
overcome more than once in British history. Had Great Britain been more
powerful, Churchill surely would have sought to extract practical settlements
from Stalin while he was still in need of assistance—much as Castlereagh had
obtained his allies’ commitment to the freedom of the Low Countries well before
the end of the Napoleonic Wars.
Churchill had been in the war longer than either of his partners. For nearly a
year after the fall of France in June 1940, Great Britain had stood alone against
Hitler and had been in no position to reflect on postwar aims. Sheer survival was
absorbing all of its energy, and the outcome of the war was quite uncertain. Even
with massive American material help, Great Britain could not have hoped to
win. If America and the Soviet Union had not entered the war when they did,
Great Britain would have eventually been driven to compromise or defeat.
Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Japan’s attack on Pearl
Harbor on December 7, 1941, and Hitler’s bizarre declaration of war on the
United States a few days later guaranteed that Great Britain would be on the
winning side no matter how long and painful the war turned out to be. Only from
that moment on could Churchill realistically begin to deal with war aims. He
would have to do so in a context that was unprecedented for Great Britain. As
the war went on, it became more and more apparent that Great Britain’s
traditional goal of maintaining a balance of power in Europe was moving out of
reach and that, after unconditional surrender was imposed on Germany, the
Soviet Union would emerge as the dominant nation on the Continent, especially
if the United States withdrew its forces.
Churchill’s wartime diplomacy therefore consisted of maneuvering between
two behemoths—both of which threatened Great Britain’s position, albeit from
opposite directions. Roosevelt’s advocacy of worldwide self-determination was a
challenge to the British Empire; Stalin’s attempt to project the Soviet Union into
the center of Europe threatened to undermine British security.
Trapped between Wilsonian idealism and Russian expansionism, Churchill did
his best, from a position of comparative weakness, to vindicate his country’s
ancient policy—that, if the world is not to be left to the strongest and the most
ruthless, peace must be based on some kind of equilibrium. He also clearly
understood that, at the end of the war, Great Britain was no longer able to defend
its vital interests all by itself, much less to police the balance of power. However
outwardly self-assured, Churchill knew—better than his American friends, who
still believed that Great Britain would be able to maintain the European
equilibrium by itself—that his nation’s wartime role was to be its last as a truly
independent global power. For Churchill, therefore, no aspect of Allied
diplomacy was more important than creating bonds of friendship with America
so solid that Great Britain would not need to face the postwar world alone. This
was why, at the end of the day, he generally gave in to American preferences—
although he often succeeded in convincing his American partner that
Washington’s strategic interests closely corresponded to those of London.
It proved to be a formidable task. For Roosevelt and his associates were
profoundly suspicious of British motives, specifically of the possibility that
Churchill might be concerned above all with advancing British national and
imperial interests and enhancing the balance of power rather than their own
approach to world order.
Most other societies would have treated the British pursuit of the national
interest as a matter of course. To American leaders, however, it represented a
flaw inherent in the British character. At a private dinner shortly after the attack
on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt had put it this way:
Our popular idea of that role may not be entirely objective—may not be one hundred per cent true
from the British point of view, but there it is; and I’ve been trying to tell him [Churchill] that he
ought to consider it. It’s in the American tradition, this distrust, this dislike and even hatred of
Britain….6
Since Roosevelt did not want to discuss war aims before Stalingrad, and since
Stalin preferred to let the battle lines determine the political outcome afterward,
most of the wartime ideas about a postwar order came from Churchill. The
American reaction to them was aptly captured by Secretary of State Hull in
November 1943, in terms highly disparaging to traditional British verities:
…there will no longer be need for spheres of influence, for alliances, for balance of power, or any
other of the special arrangements through which, in the unhappy past, the nations strove to safeguard
their security or to promote their interests.7
Throughout the war, Roosevelt was, on a human level, closer to Churchill than
he was to almost any American. Yet, on specific issues, he could also be more
acerbic toward the Prime Minister than he was toward Stalin. In Churchill, he
found a wartime comrade-in-arms; in Stalin, he saw a partner in preserving
postwar peace.
America’s ambivalence toward Great Britain was focused on three issues:
America’s own anticolonial tradition; the nature of wartime strategy; and the
shape of postwar Europe. To be sure, Russia was also a huge empire, but its
colonies were contiguous to its territory and Russian imperialism had never
impinged on the American consciousness in the same way that British
colonialism had. Churchill might complain that Roosevelt’s comparison of the
Thirteen Colonies with British possessions in the twentieth century demonstrated
“the difficulties of comparing situations in various centuries and scenes where
almost every material fact is totally different….”8 Roosevelt, however, was less
interested in refining historical analogies than in laying down fundamental
American principles. At his very first meeting with Churchill, at which the two
leaders proclaimed the Atlantic Charter, Roosevelt insisted that the Charter apply
not just in Europe, but everywhere, including the colonial areas:
I am firmly of the belief that if we are to arrive at a stable peace it must involve the development of
backward countries…. I can’t believe that we can fight a war against fascist slavery, and at the same
time not work to free people all over the world from a backward colonial policy.9
The British War Cabinet utterly rejected such an interpretation:
…the Atlantic Charter… was directed to the nations of Europe whom we hoped to free from Nazi
tyranny, and was not intended to deal with the internal affairs of the British Empire, or with relations
between the United States, and, for example, the Philippines.10
The reference to the Philippines was intended to restrain what London
considered American overexuberance by bringing home to America’s leaders
what they stood to lose if they pressed their arguments too far. Yet it ended up
missing its mark because America was in fact practicing what it preached,
having already decided to grant independence to its only colony as soon as the
war ended.
The Anglo-American debate over colonialism would not end. In a 1942
Memorial Day address, Roosevelt’s friend and confidant Undersecretary of State
Sumner Welles reiterated America’s historic opposition to colonialism:
If this war is in fact a war for the liberation of peoples it must assure the sovereign equality of
peoples throughout the world, as well as in the world of the Americas. Our victory must bring in its
train the liberation of all peoples…. The age of imperialism is ended.11
Roosevelt subsequently sent a note to Secretary of State Hull, informing him that
Welles’ statement was authoritative—the sort of gesture which does not exactly
strengthen the bonds of affection between a secretary of state and his deputy
because it implies that the deputy has the closer relationship with the president.
Hull eventually succeeded in having Welles dismissed.
Roosevelt’s views on colonialism were prescient.12 He wanted America to
take the lead in the inevitable liberation of colonial areas lest the quest for selfdetermination turn into a racial struggle—as Roosevelt confided to his adviser,
Charles Taussig:
The President said he was concerned about the brown people in the East. He said that there are
1,100,000,000 brown people. In many Eastern countries, they are ruled by a handful of whites and
they resent it. Our goal must be to help them achieve independence—1,100,000,000 potential
enemies are dangerous.13
The debate about colonialism could have no practical consequence until the end
of the war, by which time Roosevelt would no longer be alive. But the
controversy over strategy had immediate implications, reflecting widely
differing national concepts of war and peace. Where American leaders tended to
believe that military victory was an end in itself, their British counterparts
sought to relate military operations to a precise diplomatic plan for the postwar
world.
America’s most significant military experiences had been its own Civil War,
which had been fought to the finish, and the First World War. Both of which had
ended in total victory. In American thinking foreign policy and strategy were
compartmentalized into successive phases of national policy. In the ideal
American universe, diplomats stayed out of strategy, and military personnel
completed their task by the time diplomacy started—a view for which America
was to pay dearly in the Korean and Vietnam wars.
By contrast, for Churchill, war strategy and foreign policy were closely
linked. Since Great Britain’s resources were far more limited than those of the
United States, its strategists had always been obliged to focus on means as much
as ends. And, having been nearly bled white by the First World War, British
leaders were determined to avoid another similar carnage. Any strategy which
held the promise of minimizing casualties appealed to them.
Almost as soon as America had entered the war, Churchill therefore proposed
an attack on what he called the soft underbelly of the Axis in Southern Europe.
At the end of the war, insistently though in vain, he urged Eisenhower to capture
Berlin, Prague, and Vienna ahead of the Soviet armies. To Churchill, the
attractiveness of these targets was neither the vulnerability of the Balkans (which
are, in fact, extremely difficult terrain) nor the military potential of the Central
European capitals, but their utility in limiting postwar Soviet influence.
America’s military leaders reacted to Churchill’s recommendations with
impatience bordering on outrage. Viewing the soft-underbelly strategy as another
example of the British proclivity to enlist America in national British pursuits,
they dismissed it on the ground that they would not risk lives for such secondary
objectives. From the onset of joint planning, the American commanders were
eager to open a second front in France. Indifferent as to the location of the front
lines as long as the war ended in total victory, they argued that only in this
manner could the main force of the German army be brought to battle. By March
1942, General George Marshall, the United States Army Chief of Staff,
infuriated at British resistance to his plans for a second front, threatened to
reverse the socalled ABC-1 decision of a year earlier, which had given priority to
the European theater, and to switch the main American effort to the Pacific.
Roosevelt now showed that he was as strong a leader in wartime as he had
been in guiding his country into the war. Overriding Marshall, Roosevelt
reminded the quarreling generals that the initial decision to give priority to the
defeat of Germany had been made in the common interest, not as a favor to
Great Britain:
It is of the utmost importance that we appreciate that defeat of Japan does not defeat Germany and
that American concentration against Japan this year or in 1943 increases the chance of complete
German domination of Europe and Africa…. Defeat of Germany means the defeat of Japan, probably
without firing a shot or losing a life.14
Roosevelt went along with much of Churchill’s strategy but drew the line at a
landing in the Balkans. Roosevelt supported the landing in North Africa in
November 1942 and, after the conquest of the northern shore of the
Mediterranean, a landing in Italy in the spring of 1943, which knocked Italy out
of the war. The second front in Normandy did not come about until June 1944,
by which time Germany was so weakened that Allied casualties were greatly
reduced and a decisive victory was within reach.
Stalin was as passionate an advocate of the second front as were American
military leaders, but his motives were geopolitical rather than military. In 1941,
he was no doubt eager to draw German forces away from the Russian front. In
fact, he was so desperate for military assistance that he invited Great Britain to
send an expeditionary force to the Caucasus.15 In 1942, during the German
advance into southern Russia, he continued to press insistently for a second
front, though he no longer mentioned an Allied expeditionary force.
Stalin’s clamor for a second front continued even after the battle of Stalingrad,
in late 1942, had signaled that the tide was turning against Germany. What Stalin
found so attractive about a second front was, above all, its distance from Eastern
and Central Europe and the Balkans, where Western and Soviet interests were
most likely to clash. And it also guaranteed that the capitalists would not escape
undamaged from the war. Characteristically, Stalin, even while he insisted on
having a voice in Allied planning in the West, denied the democracies the
slightest access to Soviet planning or any more than the barest minimum
knowledge of Soviet military dispositions.
As it turned out, the Allies drew as many German divisions into Italy—some
thirty-three—as Stalin had requested in his demands for a second front in France
(he kept asking for between thirty and forty).16 Still, Stalin accelerated his
protests against the Southern strategy. From his point of view, its primary flaw
was its geographic proximity to countries which were the object of Soviet
ambitions. Stalin pressed for a second front in 1942 and 1943 for the same
reason that Churchill sought to delay it: because it would draw the Allies away
from the politically disputed areas.
In the debate about the origin of the Cold War, it came to be argued by some
distinguished critics that the failure to open a second front earlier had caused
Stalin’s intransigence in Eastern Europe. According to this line of reasoning, the
delay in opening a second front aroused Soviet anger and cynicism far more than
any other factor.17 It defies credulity, however, that the old Bolshevik, fresh from
a pact with Hitler and a negotiation to divide the world with the Nazi leader,
could be “disillusioned” by Realpolitik—if indeed that is what the Allied policy
was. It is difficult to imagine the organizer of the purge trials and of the Katyn
massacres driven to cynicism by a strategic decision to relate military to political
objectives. He played the second front gambit as he did everything else—coldly,
calculatingly, and realistically.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff were in any event merely reflecting the conviction of
America’s political leadership, which was to postpone any discussions of the
postwar world until after victory had been achieved. This was the fateful
decision that shaped the postwar world and made the Cold War inevitable.
As a general rule, countries striving for stability and equilibrium should do
everything within their power to achieve their basic peace terms while still at
war. As long as the enemy is in the field, his strength indirectly enhances that of
the more peaceful side. If this principle is neglected and the key issues are left
unresolved until the peace conference, the most determined power ends up in
possession of the prizes and can be dislodged only by a major confrontation.
An Allied agreement on postwar aims, or at least a discussion of them, was
especially necessary during World War II because of the policy of unconditional
surrender promulgated by Roosevelt and Churchill at Casablanca in January
1943. Roosevelt had proposed the policy for a variety of reasons. He feared that
a discussion of peace terms with Germany might prove divisive, and he wanted
to focus all of the Allies’ energy on winning the war. He was also eager to
reassure Stalin, who was then in the throes of the battle of Stalingrad, that there
would be no separate peace. But above all, Roosevelt wanted to prevent another
round of German revisionist claims later on about how Germany had been
tricked into ending the war by unfulfilled promises.
Yet Roosevelt’s refusal to discuss the shape of the postwar world while the
war was in progress threw America’s vast influence behind an outcome which
lacked such crucial elements as a balance of power or any criteria for political
solutions. In all matters to which the Wilsonian assumptions of an underlying
harmony were relevant, Roosevelt played the major role in shaping the postwar
world. Under his aegis, a series of international conferences elaborated
blueprints for the cooperative components of the postwar world order: for what
became the United Nations (at Dumbarton Oaks), for world finance (at Bretton
Woods), for food and agriculture (at Hot Springs), for relief and rehabilitation (in
Washington), and for civil aviation (in Chicago).18 But he was adamant in his
refusal to discuss war aims, or to risk disagreement with the Soviets on that
subject.
At first, Stalin treated Roosevelt’s evasion of a discussion of the postwar
settlement on the geopolitical level as a tactical maneuver designed to exploit his
military difficulties. For him, the war had been about creating a new and more
favorable balance of power out of the vacuum left by the imminent
disintegration of the Axis. Far too traditional to expect the West to leave the final
peace terms to the outcome of military operations, Stalin had tried to involve
Eden in December 1941 in a postwar settlement even as German troops were
advancing toward the suburbs of Moscow. Stalin’s introductory remarks on that
occasion made it clear that he was not talking about the Atlantic Charter.
Declarations of principle, he said, were like algebra; he preferred practical
arithmetic. Stalin did not want to waste time on abstractions, and preferred to
trade reciprocal concessions, hopefully in the form of territory.
What Stalin had in mind was plain, old-fashioned Realpolitik. Germany
should be dismembered, and Poland moved west. The Soviet Union would
return to the borders of 1941, meaning specifically the Curzon Line with Poland
and the retention of the Baltic states—a clear violation of the principle of selfdetermination as proclaimed in the Atlantic Charter. In return, the Soviet Union
would support any demand Great Britain might choose to make for bases in
France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, and Denmark19—all of them British
allies. Stalin viewed the situation as any eighteenth-century prince would have:
to the victor belong the spoils.
On the other hand, Stalin was not yet making any demands about the political
future of the Eastern European countries, and he indicated some unspecified
flexibility about the frontier with Poland. Nevertheless, Great Britain could not
totally violate the Atlantic Charter only three months after its proclamation. And
America’s leaders would not so much as consider what seemed to them a return
to the secret arrangements that had blighted the diplomacy of the First World
War. Even so, the terms offered by Stalin, however brutal, were better than what
finally emerged from the war—and they probably could have been improved by
negotiation. Eden avoided a deadlock by promising to report on his
conversations with Stalin to Churchill and Roosevelt, and to continue the
dialogue afterward.
Despite the extremity of his military situation—and perhaps because of it—
Stalin returned to the subject in the spring of 1942. Churchill was quite prepared
to explore a Soviet quid pro quo for recognition of the 1941 frontiers. But
Roosevelt and his advisers, bent on avoiding any semblance of balance-of-power
arrangements, rejected a discussion of postwar issues. Hull wrote to Churchill on
behalf of Roosevelt:
…it would be a doubtful course to abandon our broad basic declarations of policy, principles, and
practice. If these are departed from in one or two important instances, such as you propose, then
neither of the two countries parties to such an act will have any precedent to stand on, or any stable
rules by which to be governed and to insist that other Governments be governed.20
Stalin next tried to bring matters to a head by sending Molotov to London in
May 1942. In the preparatory discussions for that visit in April 1942, the Soviet
Ambassador, Ivan Maisky, raised Stalin’s terms of four months earlier.21 The
Soviet Union now demanded pacts of mutual assistance with Romania and
Finland for the postwar period. Considering that German armies were still deep
inside the Soviet Union, this came as another extraordinary expression of
Stalin’s long-range goals—though, it must be noted, it still fell far short, both in
terms of reach and of substance, of the satellite orbit which emerged at the end
of the war in the absence of an agreement.
Churchill encountered violent opposition from Washington to pursuing these
conversations. Hull described the Anglo-Soviet exchanges as contrary to the
Atlantic Charter, as a defiance of America’s historic opposition to territorial
changes by force, and as a throwback to the power politics of a discredited
past.22 Roosevelt weighed in with Stalin along much the same lines. Stalin
replied with a curt note acknowledging receipt of Roosevelt’s message but
without commenting on it, a clear signal that it had not been favorably received.
In a note sent simultaneously to Churchill, Stalin urged him to ignore “American
interference.”23
Early in the war, Stalin was clearly eager for an arrangement on the 1941
frontiers; and he was much too cynical not to have expected a request for some
kind of quid pro quo. Nothing is more futile than historical might-have-beens;
the price Stalin was willing to pay will never be known because Roosevelt cut
short the Anglo-Soviet dialogue by inviting Molotov to Washington.
On the occasion of Eden’s visit to Moscow in December 1941, Stalin had
indicated his flexibility on the issue of Poland’s borders by calling it an “open
question.”24 With 20/20 historical hindsight, Stalin might have been willing to
trade the recognition of the 1941 borders for his acceptance of the Eastern
European governments-in-exile (which he had not yet challenged) with a caveat
for the Baltic States to return to their 1940 independent status and permit Soviet
bases on their territory. This might then have led to an outcome for Eastern
Europe on the Finnish model—respectful of Soviet security but also democratic
and free to conduct a nonaligned foreign policy. It would surely have been better
for the well-being of the peoples of Eastern Europe than what transpired and, in
the end, even for the Soviet Union.
All such prospects vanished as soon as Molotov reached Washington at the
end of May 1942 and learned that America was asking the Soviet Union not for
a political arrangement but for an agreement to a new approach to world order.
Roosevelt presented Molotov with the American alternative to Stalin’s (and
Churchill’s) ideas on spheres of influence. Quite simply, the formula was a
return to Wilson’s concept of collective security as modified by the idea of the
Four Policemen. Such an arrangement, argued Roosevelt, would provide the
Soviet Union with better security than the traditional balance of power.25
Why Roosevelt believed that Stalin, who had made such Machiavellian
proposals to Churchill, would find world government attractive is not clear.
Perhaps he thought that, if worse came to worst and Stalin insisted on keeping
the territory his armies had conquered, it would be easier domestically to
acquiesce to a fait accompli than to agree to Stalin’s demands while the military
outcome was still uncertain.
Roosevelt was more specific regarding the colonial issue. He proposed an
international trusteeship for all former colonies which “ought for our own safety
to be taken away from weak nations” (a category in which he included
France).26 And he invited the Soviet Union to become a founding member of the
Trusteeship Council.
Had Molotov been more of a philosopher, he might have reflected on the
circularity of history by which, in the space of eighteen months, he had been
offered membership in two different, opposing, alliances: by Hitler and
Ribbentrop in a tripartite pact consisting of Germany, Italy, and Japan; and by
Roosevelt in a coalition including the United States, Great Britain, and China. In
each case, the suitor had tried to woo Molotov with the prospect of exotic lands
to the south: Berlin had offered the Middle East; Washington, colonial
trusteeships. In neither case would Molotov permit himself to be deflected from
his single-minded pursuit of immediate Soviet objectives within the reach of
Soviet armies.
Nor did Molotov see any need to adjust his tactics to the interlocutor at hand.
In Washington, as he had done earlier in Berlin, Molotov agreed in principle to
join the proposed arrangement. That the Four Policemen would have placed him
in the company of the sworn enemies of the grouping whose offer he had
likewise entertained eighteen months earlier did not seem to disturb him. Nor, as
in Berlin, did Molotov’s agreement in principle imply any cause for him to
abandon Stalin’s territorial ambitions in Europe. In Washington, as in Berlin,
Molotov was adamant about the 1941 borders, about demanding a dominant
Soviet influence in Bulgaria, Romania, and Finland, and special rights in the
Straits. On both occasions, he deferred the colonial issue to a later date.
In all probability, Stalin could hardly believe his good fortune when Molotov
informed him of Washington’s refusal to discuss a political settlement while the
war was in progress. For this meant that he needed to make no concessions as
long as the German army was still in the field. Significantly, once Stalin
understood that America was deferring a political settlement into the postwar
period, he abandoned his usual persistent, hectoring style and never raised the
subject again. With his bargaining position improving at each step closer to an
Allied victory, Stalin stood to gain the most by delaying political discussions and
by seizing as much booty as he could, if only to use these gains as bargaining
chips at a peace conference. Nobody was more conscious than Stalin of the old
adage that possession is nine-tenths of the law.
Roosevelt’s reluctance to jeopardize postwar cooperation with the Soviet
Union by prematurely discussing war aims may have had a strategic as well as a
Wilsonian rationale. Roosevelt may have been aware of the possibility of Soviet
postwar expansionism but may have felt trapped between his people’s
convictions and the looming strategic peril. To maintain the war effort,
Roosevelt above all needed to appeal to American ideals, which deplored
spheres of influence and the balance of power. It was, after all, only a few years
since the Congress had enthusiastically passed the Neutrality Acts, and the ideas
underlying them had not disappeared. Roosevelt may have concluded that,
whatever the Soviet intentions, his optimum strategy was to give Stalin a
reputation to uphold. For only against such a backdrop would he have a chance
to mobilize America to resist Soviet expansionism if it really came to pass.
This is the view of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who has argued that Roosevelt had
prepared a fallback position in case Soviet-American relations went sour: “a
great army, a network of overseas bases, plans for peacetime universal military
training and the Anglo-American monopoly of the atomic bomb.”27
True, Roosevelt had all of these means at his disposal. But his motivation in
assembling them was to spruce up the war effort rather than as a hedge against
Soviet expansionism. The bases had been acquired to make possible the transfer
of destroyers to Great Britain; the atom bomb was aimed at the Nazis and Japan;
and all indications are that Roosevelt would have demobilized the army rapidly
and brought it home—indeed, he said so on many occasions. No doubt, once
Roosevelt had become convinced of Stalin’s bad faith he would have become a
skillful and determined opponent of Soviet expansionism and would have had at
his disposal the tools described. There is little evidence, however, that he had
ever reached that judgment or viewed his military capabilities in terms of a
possible confrontation with the Soviet Union.
As the war drew to a close, Roosevelt did express irritation with Stalin’s
tactics. Yet, throughout the war, Roosevelt had remained remarkably consistent,
even eloquent, in his commitment to Soviet-American cooperation, and he
considered no assignment more important than overcoming Stalin’s distrust.
Walter Lippmann may have been right when he said of Roosevelt, “He distrusted
everybody. What he thought he could do was to outwit Stalin, which is quite a
different thing.”28 If that was his intention, he did not succeed.
Roosevelt relied on personal relations with Stalin in a way that Churchill
never would. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Churchill explained Great
Britain’s decision to support Stalin with a phrase which involved neither
personal nor moral endorsement: “If Hitler invaded Hell, he [Churchill] would at
least make a favourable reference to the Devil!”29 Roosevelt showed no such
reserve. Shortly after America’s entry into the war, he attempted to arrange a
meeting with Stalin at the Bering Straits to the exclusion of Churchill. It was to
be “an informal and completely simple visit for a few days between you and me”
to achieve “a meeting of minds.” Roosevelt would bring only Harry Hopkins, an
interpreter, and a stenographer; the seals and the gulls would be their
witnesses.30
The Bering Straits meeting never took place. But two summits did occur—at
Teheran from November 28 to December 1, 1943, and at Yalta from February 4
to 11, 1945. On both occasions, Stalin went to great lengths to demonstrate to
Roosevelt and Churchill that they needed the meeting much more than he did;
even the settings were designed to reduce the Anglo-Americans’ confidence in
their ability to extract concessions from him. Teheran was only a few hundred
miles from the Soviet border, and Yalta, of course, was on Soviet territory. In
each case, the Western leaders had to travel thousands of miles, an especially
arduous imposition on a man of Roosevelt’s handicaps even at the time of the
Teheran meeting. By the time of Yalta, the President was mortally ill.
Yalta has borne the opprobrium for the shape of the postwar world. Yet, when
it occurred, Soviet armies had already crossed all their 1941 borders and were in
a position to impose unilaterally Soviet political control over the rest of Eastern
Europe. If a postwar settlement was ever to have been negotiated at any summit,
the appropriate time would have been at Teheran, fifteen months earlier. Before
then, the Soviet Union had been struggling to avert defeat; at the time of
Teheran, the battle for Stalingrad had been won, victory was certain, and a
separate Soviet-Nazi deal was highly improbable.
In Teheran, Roosevelt had initially planned to stay at the American legation,
some distance from the Soviet and British embassies, which stood back to back.
There was a constant worry that, en route to a meeting at the Soviet or British
compound, Roosevelt might fall victim to a bomb-throwing Axis sympathizer.
Therefore, at the first plenary session, which was held in the American legation,
Roosevelt accepted Stalin’s invitation to move to a villa in the Soviet compound.
It was furnished according to the pretentious and gaudy style of Soviet interior
design for high personages and, no doubt, was suitably bugged for the occasion.
Roosevelt could have offered no stronger signal of trust and goodwill than to
accept Stalin’s offer of Soviet lodgings. Yet the gesture left no significant impact
on Stalin’s strategy, which was to castigate Churchill and Roosevelt about the
delay in opening the second front. Stalin liked to put interlocutors on the
defensive. In this instance, it had the additional benefit of focusing attention on a
region far from the areas that would soon be in contention. He elicited a formal
promise to open a second front in France by the spring of 1944. The three Allies
also agreed on the complete demilitarization of Germany and on their respective
occupation zones. On one occasion, when Stalin urged the execution of 50,000
German officers, Churchill walked out and returned only after Stalin had
followed him to give his assurances that he had been jesting—which, in light of
what we now know of the Katyn massacre of Polish officers, was probably not
true.31 Then, at a private meeting, Roosevelt outlined his idea of the Four
Policemen to a skeptical Stalin.
All of these issues delayed discussion of postwar arrangements, which was
left until the last day of the Conference. Roosevelt agreed to Stalin’s plan to
move the frontiers of Poland westward and indicated that he would not press
Stalin on the question of the Baltics. If Soviet armies occupied the Baltic States,
he said, neither the United States nor Great Britain would “turn her out”—
though he also recommended holding a plebiscite. The fact was, Roosevelt was
as reluctant to undertake a full-scale discussion of the postwar world as he had
been when Molotov visited Washington eighteen months earlier. He therefore
put forward his comments on Stalin’s postwar plans for Eastern Europe so
tentatively as to sound almost apologetic. Roosevelt called Stalin’s attention to
the 6 million American voters of Polish extraction who were in a position to
influence his re-election in the coming year. Though “personally he agreed with
the views of Marshal Stalin as to the necessity of the restoration of a Polish state
[he] would like to see the Eastern border moved farther to the west and the
Western border moved even to the River Oder. He hoped, however, that the
Marshal would understand that for political reasons outlined above, he could not
participate in any decision here in Teheran or even next winter on this subject
and that he could not publicly take part in any such arrangement at the present
time.”32 This could hardly have conveyed to Stalin that he was running a great
risk by proceeding unilaterally; indeed, it implied that America’s agreement after
the election was largely a formality.
The reason Roosevelt was putting forward American political goals so
halfheartedly was that he viewed his principal objective at Teheran as
establishing the concept of the Four Policemen. One of the methods he used to
attempt to gain Stalin’s confidence was to dissociate himself ostentatiously from
Churchill, as he reported to Frances Perkins, an old friend and his Secretary of
Labor:
Winston got red and scowled, and the more he did so, the more Stalin smiled. Finally, Stalin broke
out into a deep, hearty guffaw, and for the first time in three days I saw light. I kept it up until Stalin
was laughing with me, and it was then that I called him “Uncle Joe.” He would have thought me
fresh the day before, but that day he laughed and came over and shook my hand.
From that time on our relations were personal…. The ice was broken and we talked like men and
brothers.33
The reinvention of Stalin, organizer of purges and recent collaborator of Hitler,
into “Uncle Joe,” the paragon of moderation, was surely the ultimate triumph of
hope over experience. Yet Roosevelt’s emphasis on Stalin’s goodwill was not a
personal idiosyncrasy, but vented the attitude of a people with more faith in the
inherent goodness of man than in geopolitical analysis. They preferred to see
Stalin as an avuncular friend rather than as a totalitarian dictator. In May 1943,
Stalin disbanded the Comintern, the Communist Party’s formal instrument of
world revolution. It came at a moment in time when world revolution could
hardly have been either a top Soviet priority or a serious capability. Yet Senator
Tom Connally of Texas, a key member of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee and soon to be its chairman, greeted Stalin’s move as a fundamental
turn toward Western values: “Russians for years have been changing their
economy and approaching the abandonment of Communism, and the whole
Western world will be gratified at the happy climax of their efforts.”34 Even
Fortune magazine, a bastion of American capitalism, wrote in a similar vein.35
At the end of the Teheran Conference, therefore, the American people saw
nothing unusual in their president’s summing up its achievements through a
personal evaluation of the Soviet dictator:
I may say that I “got along fine” with Marshal Stalin. He is a man who combines a tremendous,
relentless determination with a stalwart good humor. I believe he is truly representative of the heart
and soul of Russia; and I believe that we are going to get along very well with him and the Russian
people—very well indeed.36
When, in June 1944, the Allies landed in Normandy and advanced from the
west, Germany’s doom was sealed. As the military situation turned irrevocably
in his favor, Stalin progressively raised his terms. In 1941, he had asked for
acceptance of the 1941 borders (with a possibility of modifying them), and
indicated a willingness to recognize the London-based free Poles. In 1942, he
began to complain about the composition of the Polish government-in-exile. In
1943, he created an alternative to it in the socalled free Lublin Committee. By
late 1944, he had recognized the Lublin group—dominated by communists—as
the provisional government, and banned the London Poles. In 1941, Stalin’s
primary issue had been frontiers; by 1945, it had become political control of
territories beyond those frontiers.
Churchill understood what was taking place. But Great Britain had become
too dependent on the United States to sustain solitary initiatives. Nor was Great
Britain strong enough to oppose by itself Stalin’s increasingly bold creation of a
Soviet sphere in Eastern Europe. In October 1944, Churchill undertook an
almost quixotic enterprise to settle the future of Eastern Europe directly with
Stalin. During a visit to Moscow which lasted eight days, Churchill jotted down
a spheres-of-influence arrangement and handed it to Stalin. In it, he envisaged a
delineation of spheres in terms of percentages, with Great Britain obtaining 90
percent in Greece, and the Soviet Union 90 percent in Romania and 75 percent
in Bulgaria; Hungary and Yugoslavia were divided according to a 50–50 basis.
Stalin accepted on the spot—though Molotov, in the best Soviet tradition of
horse trading, sought in a dialogue with Eden to shave the British percentages,
giving the Soviets a greater edge in every East European country except
Hungary.37
The British effort had a certain pathos about it. Never before had spheres of
influence been defined by percentages. No criteria to measure compliance
existed, or any means of enforcement. Influence would be defined by the
presence of the contending armies. In this manner, Greece fell into the British
sphere, with or without the agreement, while all the other states—except
Yugoslavia—became Soviet satellites regardless of the percentages assigned to
them. Even Yugoslavia’s freedom of action resulted not from the ChurchillStalin agreement but from the fact that it had been under Soviet occupation for
only a very brief period and had liberated itself from German military
occupation through a major guerrilla effort of its own.
By the time of the Yalta Conference in February 1945, nothing remained of
the Churchill-Stalin agreement. The Soviet army was already in possession of all
the disputed territories, making the frontiers issue largely moot. Moreover, it was
intervening massively in the internal arrangements of all the occupied countries.
Already in severely failing health, Roosevelt had to fly from Malta to a snowy
airport in Saki, in the Crimea, and from there was driven the ninety miles to
Yalta in some five hours over difficult, snow-covered roads. His quarters were a
three-room suite in the Livadia Palace. (In the nineteenth century, Livadia had
been a favorite winter resort of the tsars: in 1877, Alexander II had planned his
Balkan invasion from there; in 1911, Tsar Nicholas II had built a white granite
palace on the bluffs overlooking the Black Sea, which became the site of the
Conference of the Big Three.) The tactics of the participants did not change with
the new surroundings. Churchill was anxious to discuss postwar political
arrangements but was overruled by his two colleagues, each of whom pursued
his own distinct agenda. Roosevelt sought an agreement on voting procedures
for the United Nations, and to nail down Soviet participation in the war against
Japan. Stalin was happy enough to discuss both subjects, because the time spent
on them would not be available for a discussion of Eastern Europe, and because
he was eager (not reluctant, as some Americans thought) to enter the war against
Japan, which would make it possible for him to share in the spoils of that victory
as well.
Churchill was above all concerned with the European balance of power. He
wanted to restore France to Great Power status, to resist the dismemberment of
Germany, and to reduce exorbitant Soviet demands for reparations. Though
Churchill was successful with respect to all three issues, they were essentially
sideshows to the settlement of Eastern Europe—which was even then being
foreclosed daily by the behavior of the Red Army. By this time, Stalin had
prepared a riposte to Roosevelt’s ploy that the Soviet Union should make
concessions in order to spare him the wrath of his domestic opposition: when
Roosevelt asked that the city of Lvov remain with Poland in order to pacify his
domestic Polish critics, Stalin replied that, much as he would like to oblige, his
own Ukrainian population would create an insuperable domestic problem for
him.38
In the end, Churchill and Roosevelt accepted Russia’s 1941 borders, a painful
step for Churchill, whose country had gone to war to preserve Poland’s territorial
integrity. They agreed as well that Poland’s western frontier would be moved
toward the Oder and Neisse rivers. Since there were two Neisse rivers, the final
delineation was left unresolved. Churchill and Roosevelt accepted the Moscowcreated Lublin government with the proviso that it be broadened to include some
democratic political figures from the London-based Polish government-in-exile.
Stalin’s concession to his allies was a Joint Declaration on Liberated Europe,
which promised free elections and the establishment of democratic governments
in Eastern Europe. Stalin obviously thought that he was promising the Soviet
version of free elections, especially since the Red Army would have already
occupied the countries in question. This is in fact what happened, though Stalin
vastly underestimated the seriousness with which Americans have traditionally
approached legal documents. Later, when it decided to organize resistance to
Soviet expansionism, America did so on the basis of Stalin’s failure to keep his
word—as given at Yalta and as the American leaders and public had understood
it.
Stalin’s reaction to Roosevelt’s appeal to join the war against Japan illustrated
how different his rules of the coalition game were from Roosevelt’s. In a
discussion from which Churchill was excluded—even though Great Britain had
been an early victim of Japanese aggression—nothing was heard of Allied unity
as its own reward or of avoiding political issues so as to create favorable
preconditions for the Four Policemen. Stalin felt not the least bit inhibited about
insisting on special benefits while the war was still going on, and on being paid
in strategic, not emotional, coin. The quid pro quo he demanded was
unabashedly resurrected from the days of the tsars.
Stalin’s claim to the southern part of Sakhalin Island and to the Kurile Islands
did bear a certain, albeit vague, relationship to Soviet security and Russian
history. But his demand for free ports in Darien and Port Arthur and the right to
manage the Manchurian railways was straight out of tsarist imperialist textbooks
from the turn of the century. In Roosevelt’s least comprehensible decision at
Yalta, he granted these demands in a secret agreement which amounted to
returning to Moscow the predominant role in Manchuria that it had lost in the
Russo-Japanese War—one it was not to lose until the Chinese communists took
over Beijing in 1949.
After the Yalta Conference, all was jubilation. In reporting to the Congress,
Roosevelt emphasized the agreement reached on the United Nations but not the
decision regarding the political future of either Europe or Asia. For the second
time in a generation, an American president was returning from Europe to
proclaim the end of history. “The Yalta Conference,” affirmed Roosevelt,
…ought to spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of
influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries—and
have always failed. We propose to substitute for all these, a universal organization in which all peaceloving Nations will finally have a chance to join. I am confident that the Congress and the American
people will accept the results of this Conference as the beginnings of a permanent structure of
peace.39
In other words, Roosevelt had granted Stalin a sphere of influence in northern
China to encourage him to participate in a world order that would make spheres
of influence irrelevant.
When the Yalta Conference ended, only the unity of the wartime alliance was
being celebrated; the fissures that would later undo it were not yet widely
perceived. Hope still reigned supreme and “Uncle Joe” was viewed as an
uncomplicated partner. Reflecting on Yalta, Harry Hopkins expressed his
concern that Stalin, the presumed moderate, might buckle under pressure from
hard-liners in the Kremlin:
The Russians had proved that they could be reasonable and farseeing and there wasn’t any doubt in
the minds of the President or any of us that we could live with them and get along with them
peacefully for as far into the future as any of us could imagine. But I have to make one amendment to
that—I think we all had in our minds the reservation that we could not foretell what the results would
be if anything should happen to Stalin. We felt sure that we could count on him to be reasonable and
sensible and understanding—but we never could be sure who or what might be in back of him there
in the Kremlin.40
The theme that the incumbent in the Kremlin was in his heart of hearts a
peaceful moderate in need of help in overcoming his intransigent colleagues was
to remain a constant of American discussions ever after, regardless of the Soviet
leader. Indeed, these assessments survived even into the postcommunist period,
when they were applied, first to Mikhail Gorbachev, and then to Boris Yeltsin.
The importance of personal relations among leaders and of the existence of an
underlying harmony among nations continued to be affirmed by America as the
war drew to a conclusion. On January 20, 1945, in his fourth inaugural address,
Roosevelt described his approach by quoting from Emerson: “…the only way to
have a friend is to be one.”41 Soon after Yalta, Roosevelt characterized Stalin to
the Cabinet as “having something else in him besides this revolutionist
Bolshevist thing.” He ascribed that special quality to Stalin’s early education for
the priesthood: “I think that something entered into his nature of the way in
which a Christian gentleman should behave.”42
Stalin, however, was a master practitioner of Realpolitik, not a Christian
gentleman. As the Soviet armies advanced, Stalin was implementing what he
had privately told Milovan Djilas, then a Yugoslav communist leader:
This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system.
Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.43
Stalin’s rules of the game were demonstrated dramatically in the final stages of
the war. In April 1945, Churchill pressed Eisenhower, as Commander-in-Chief
of the Allied forces, to seize Berlin, Prague, and Vienna ahead of the advancing
Soviet armies. The American chiefs of staff would not consider the request,
using it as a final opportunity to teach their British ally the need for military
planning unaffected by political considerations: “Such psychological and
political advantages as would result from the possible capture of Berlin ahead of
the Russians should not override the imperative military consideration, which in
our opinion is the destruction and dismemberment of the German armed
forces.”44
Since there was no significant German armed forces left either to dismember
or to destroy, rejecting Churchill’s appeal was clearly a matter of principle for
the American chiefs of staff. Indeed, the chiefs felt so strongly about their view
that General Eisenhower took it upon himself to write directly to Stalin on
March 28, 1945, to inform him that he would not advance on Berlin, and to
propose that American and Soviet troops meet near Dresden.
No doubt astonished that a general would address a head of state on any
subject, let alone a matter of such political importance, Stalin was also not in the
habit of turning down free political gifts. On April 1, he replied to Eisenhower
that he agreed with his assessment; he, too, considered Berlin of secondary
strategic interest and would devote only minor Soviet forces to capture it. He
also agreed to a link-up along the Elbe, in the general area of Dresden. Having
been handed the prize, Stalin proceeded to show that he, at least, had his political
priorities straight. Contravening his assurances to Eisenhower, he ordered the
main thrust of the Soviet ground offensive to be aimed at Berlin, giving
Marshals Zhukov and Koniev two weeks to launch an attack he had told
Eisenhower would not take place until the second half of May.45
By April 1945, two months after Yalta, Stalin’s violations of the Yalta
Declaration on Liberated Europe had become flagrant, especially with respect to
Poland. Churchill was reduced to sending a plaintive letter in which he appealed
to “my friend Stalin.” Accepting Stalin’s proposition that no individuals hostile
to the Soviet Union should serve in the new Polish government, Churchill
pleaded for the inclusion of some of the members of the Polish government-inexile in London who met his test. By this time, the mere lack of hostile
sentiments was no longer enough for Stalin; only a totally friendly government
would do. On May 5, 1945, Stalin replied:
…we cannot be satisfied that persons should be associated with the formation of the future Polish
Government who, as you express it, “are not fundamentally anti-Soviet,” or that only those persons
should be excluded from participation in this work who are in your opinion “extremely unfriendly
towards Russia.” Neither of these criteria can satisfy us. We insist, and shall insist, that there should
be brought into consultation on the formation of the future Polish Government only those persons
who have actively shown a friendly attitude towards the Soviet Union and who are honestly and
sincerely prepared to cooperate with the Soviet State.46
The adjectives “active” and “friendly” were, of course, applicable only to
members of the Polish Communist Party and, from among these, only to those
Party members totally subservient to Moscow. Four years later, even lifelong
communists suspected of national feelings would be purged.
But was an alternative strategy feasible? Or were the democracies doing the
best they could, given the geographic and military realities that existed at the
time? These are haunting questions, because, in retrospect, everything that
happened seems inevitable. The longer the interval, the more difficult it becomes
to imagine an alternative outcome or to prove its viability. And history refuses to
be played back like a movie reel in which new endings are spliced in at will.
Restoration of the 1941 Soviet frontiers was nearly impossible to prevent. A
more dynamic Western policy might have achieved certain modifications, even
the return of some form of independence to the Baltic States, perhaps linked to
the Soviet Union by treaties of mutual assistance and the presence of Soviet
military bases. If this had ever been attainable, it would only have been so in
1941 or 1942, when the Soviet Union was teetering at the brink of catastrophe.
And it was understandable that Roosevelt should have been loath to burden
Soviet decision-makers with such distasteful choices at a moment when,
America not yet having entered the war, the greatest fear was an imminent
Soviet collapse.
After the battle of Stalingrad, however, the issue of Eastern Europe’s future
could have been raised without risking either a Soviet collapse or a separate
peace with Hitler. An effort should have been made to settle the political
structure of territories beyond the Soviet frontiers and to achieve for these
countries a status similar to that of Finland.
Would Stalin have made a separate peace with Hitler if the democracies had
been more insistent? Stalin never made such a threat, though he did manage to
create the impression that it was always a possibility. Only two episodes have
come to light indicating that Stalin might have considered a separate
arrangement. The first dates to the early days of the war, when panic was
rampant. Allegedly, Stalin, Molotov, and Kaganovich asked the Bulgarian
Ambassador to explore with Hitler the possibility of settling for the Baltics,
Bessarabia, and slices of Belorussia and the Ukraine—in essence, the 1938
Soviet frontiers—but the Ambassador supposedly refused to transmit the
message.47 And Hitler surely would have refused such a settlement while
German armies were heading toward Moscow, Kiev, and Leningrad, and had
already gone far beyond what the “peace offer”—if that is what it was—
suggested. The Nazi plan was to depopulate the Soviet Union up to the line from
Archangel to Astrakhan, which was far beyond Moscow, and to reduce that part
of its population as had managed to avoid extermination into slavery.48
The second episode is even more ambiguous. It occurred in September 1943,
eight months after Stalingrad and two months after the battle of Kursk, which
wiped out most of the German offensive armor. Ribbentrop presented Hitler with
a strange tale indeed. A Soviet deputy foreign minister who had at one time been
Ambassador to Berlin was visiting Stockholm, and Ribbentrop interpreted this as
an opportunity for exploratory talks of a separate peace along the 1941 borders.
It was almost surely wishful thinking, because at that point Soviet armies were
approaching the 1941 frontiers on their own.
Hitler rejected the alleged opportunity, telling his Foreign Minister, “You
know, Ribbentrop, if I came to an agreement with Russia today I’d attack her
again tomorrow—I just can’t help myself.” He spoke in the same vein to
Goebbels. The timing was “totally unsuitable”; negotiations would have to be
preceded by a decisive military victory.49 As late as 1944, Hitler still believed
that, after repelling the second front, he would be able to conquer Russia.
Above all, a separate peace, even along the 1941 frontiers, would have solved
nothing for either Stalin or Hitler. It would have left Stalin face to face with a
powerful Germany and the prospect that, in another conflict, the democracies
would abandon their treacherous partner. And it would have been interpreted by
Hitler as advancing the Soviet armies toward Germany without any assurance
that they would not resume the war at the earliest opportunity.
Roosevelt’s concept of the Four Policemen foundered on the same obstacle as
had Wilson’s more general concept of collective security: the Four Policemen
simply did not perceive their global goals in the same way. Stalin’s lethal
combination of paranoia, communist ideology, and Russian imperialism
translated the notion of the Four Policemen impartially enforcing world peace on
the basis of universally shared values into either a Soviet opportunity or a
capitalist trap. Stalin knew that Great Britain by itself was no counterweight to
the Soviet Union and that this would either create a huge vacuum in front of the
Soviet Union or serve as the prelude to later confrontation with the United States
(which, as a first-generation Bolshevik, Stalin was bound to consider the more
likely result). On the basis of either hypothesis, Stalin’s course of action was
clear: he would push Soviet power as far westward as possible, either to collect
his spoils or to put himself into the best bargaining position for a diplomatic
showdown later.
For that matter, America was itself unprepared to accept the consequences of
its President’s Four Policemen. If the concept were to work, America had to be
willing to intervene wherever peace was threatened. Yet Roosevelt never tired of
telling his fellow Allies that neither American troops nor American resources
would be available to restore Europe, and that preserving the peace had to be a
British and Russian task. At Yalta, he told his colleagues that American troops
would not stay longer than two years in occupation duty.50
If that was true, the Soviet Union was bound to dominate Central Europe,
leaving Great Britain with an insuperable quandary. On the one hand, it was no
longer strong enough to maintain the balance of power against the Soviet Union
all by itself. On the other hand, to the extent that Great Britain would attempt
some sort of solitary initiative, it was likely to encounter traditional American
objections. For example, in January 1945, The New York Times reported a secret
communication from Roosevelt to Churchill on the British attempt to maintain a
noncommunist government in Greece. According to that report, Roosevelt had
made it quite clear that the American public’s favorable disposition toward
postwar Anglo-American cooperation was fragile: “…the British have been told
with force and authority that the mood can change as mercurially as the English
weather if the American people once get the idea that this war… [is] just another
struggle between rival imperialisms.”51
But if America refused to defend Europe, and British attempts to act alone
were labeled as imperialist, the doctrine of the Four Policemen would lead to the
same vacuum that the concept of collective security had in the 1930s. Until
American perceptions changed, resistance to Soviet expansionism would be
impossible. By the time America came to grips with this danger and re-entered
the fray, the result would be the very spheres of influence it had so strenuously
avoided during the war, albeit with a much less propitious demarcation line. At
the end of the day, geopolitics could not be denied. America was drawn back
into Europe; Japan and Germany were restored in order to rebuild the
equilibrium; and the Soviet Union embarked on forty-five years of tension and
strategic overextension leading to its final collapse.
Asia presented another difficult problem. Roosevelt had included China in the
Big Four partly as a courtesy and partly to have an Asian anchor to his global
design. However, China was even less capable than Great Britain of carrying out
the mission Roosevelt had assigned to it. At the end of the war, China was an
underdeveloped country in the throes of civil war. How could it serve as a world
policeman? When Roosevelt discussed his idea of the Four Policemen at
Teheran, Stalin had raised the reasonable question of how Europeans would react
if China were to try to settle their disputes. He added that, in his view, China
would not be strong enough for such a global role, and suggested instead the
creation of regional committees to maintain the peace.52 Roosevelt rejected this
suggestion as tending toward spheres of influence; peace had to be defended on
a global basis or not at all.
And yet, when all these ambiguities surrounding Roosevelt have been
catalogued, the question remains whether any other approach could have
commanded the support of the American people. Americans, after all, have
always been more prepared to believe that a system based on the explicit
rejection of democratic principles might suddenly reverse course than that they
might have anything to learn from previous peace settlements—none of which,
in the real world, had prospered without equilibrium or lasted for any length of
time without a moral consensus.
Churchill’s geopolitical analysis proved far more accurate than Roosevelt’s.
Yet Roosevelt’s reluctance to see the world in geopolitical terms was the reverse
side of the same idealism which had propelled America into the war and enabled
it to preserve the cause of freedom. Had Roosevelt followed Churchill’s
prescriptions, he would have improved America’s bargaining position but might
have sacrificed its ability to sustain the confrontations of the Cold War that were
still ahead.
That Roosevelt went more than the proverbial extra mile during the war was
the precondition for the great initiatives by which America would restore the
global equilibrium—although the United States denied the entire time that this
was what it was in fact doing. Roosevelt’s conception of the postwar world may
have been far too optimistic. But in light of American history, this position
almost surely represented a necessary stage that America needed to traverse if it
hoped to overcome the crisis ahead. In the end, Roosevelt led his society through
two of the most tremendous crises of its history. He would surely not have been
so successful in those endeavors had he been more imbued with a sense of
historical relativity.
However inevitably, the war ended with a geopolitical vacuum. The balance of
power had been destroyed, and a comprehensive peace treaty remained elusive.
The world was now divided into ideological camps. The postwar period would
turn into an extended and painful struggle to achieve the settlement which had
eluded the leaders before the war ended.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Beginning of the Cold War
Like Moses, Franklin Delano Roosevelt saw the Promised Land, but it was not
given to him to reach it. When he died, Allied armies stood deep inside
Germany, and the battle for Okinawa, the prelude to the planned Allied invasion
of Japan’s main islands, had just begun.
Roosevelt’s death on April 12, 1945, was not unexpected. In January,
Roosevelt’s doctor, alarmed by the sharp fluctuations in his patient’s blood
pressure, had concluded that the President would survive only if he avoided any
tension. Given the pressures of the presidency, that assessment was tantamount
to a death sentence.1 For one mad moment, Hitler and Goebbels, who were
trapped in encircled Berlin, deluded themselves into believing that they were
about to witness a replay of what German history books describe as the miracle
of the House of Brandenburg—when, during the Seven Years’ War, as Russian
armies stood at the gates of Berlin, Frederick the Great was saved by the sudden
death of the Russian ruler and the accession of a friendly tsar. History, however,
did not repeat itself in 1945. Nazi crimes had welded at least one unshakable
common Allied purpose: to eliminate the scourge of Nazism.
The collapse of Nazi Germany and the need to fill the resulting power vacuum
led to the disintegration of the wartime partnership. The purposes of the Allies
were simply too divergent. Churchill sought to prevent the Soviet Union from
dominating Central Europe. Stalin wanted to be paid in territorial coin for Soviet
military victories and the heroic suffering of the Russian people. The new
President, Harry S. Truman, initially strove to continue Roosevelt’s legacy of
holding the alliance together. By the end of his first term, however, every vestige
of wartime harmony had vanished. The United States and the Soviet Union, the
two giants at the periphery, were now facing off against one another in the very
heart of Europe.
Harry S. Truman’s background was as different from that of his great
predecessor as could be imagined. Roosevelt had been a member in good
standing of the cosmopolitan Northeastern establishment; Truman came from the
Midwestern rural middle class. Roosevelt had been educated at the best
preparatory schools and universities; Truman had never gone beyond the
secondary school level, though Dean Acheson was to say of him affectionately
and admiringly that he was a Yale man in the best sense of the word. Roosevelt’s
entire life had been a preparation for the highest office; Truman was a product of
the Kansas City political machine.
Selected as vice president only after Roosevelt’s first choice, James Byrnes,
was vetoed by the labor movement, Harry Truman gave little indication in his
prior political career that he would turn out to be an extraordinary president.
Without any real foreign policy experience and left equipped by Roosevelt with
only the vaguest of road maps, Truman inherited the task of winding down the
war and building a new international order even while the design established at
Teheran and at Yalta was coming apart.
As it turned out, Truman presided over the beginning of the Cold War and the
development of the policy of containment that would eventually win it. He took
the United States into its first peacetime military alliance. Under his guidance,
Roosevelt’s concept of the Four Policemen was replaced by an unprecedented
set of coalitions which were to remain at the core of American foreign policy for
forty years. Espousing America’s faith in the universality of its values, this plain
man from the Midwest encouraged prostrate enemies to rejoin the society of
democratic nations. He sponsored the Marshall Plan and the Point Four Program,
through which America devoted resources and technology to the recovery and
development of distant societies.
I met Truman only once, early in 1961, while I was a junior professor at
Harvard. A speaking engagement in Kansas City provided me with an occasion
to call on the ex-President at the Truman Presidential Library in nearby
Independence, Missouri. The passage of the years had not diminished the former
President’s jauntiness. After taking me on a tour of the institution, Truman
invited me to his office, which was a replica of the White House Oval Office
during his presidency. Having heard that I was consulting part-time at the
Kennedy White House, he asked me what I had learned. Drawing on standard
Washington cocktail-party wisdom, I replied that the bureaucracy appeared to
me to function as a fourth branch of government, severely constricting the
president’s freedom of action. Truman found this remark neither amusing nor
instructive. Impatient at being subjected to what he labeled “professor talk,” he
responded with an expletive, then introduced his view of the role of the
president: “If the president knows what he wants, no bureaucrat can stop him. A
president has to know when to stop taking advice.”
Quickly retreating to more familiar academic ground, I asked Truman for
which foreign policy decision he most wanted to be remembered. He did not
hesitate. “We completely defeated our enemies and made them surrender,” he
remarked. “And then we helped them to recover, to become democratic, and to
rejoin the community of nations. Only America could have done that.”
Afterward, he walked with me through the streets of Independence to the simple
house in which he lived so that I could meet his wife, Bess.
I recount this brief conversation because it captured so completely Truman’s
quintessentially American nature: his sense for the majesty of the presidency and
the responsibilities of the president, his pride in America’s strength, and, above
all, his belief that America’s ultimate calling was to serve as a fount of freedom
and progress for all mankind.
Truman embarked on his own presidency from deep within the shadow of
Roosevelt, who had by his death been elevated to near-mythic stature. Truman
genuinely admired Roosevelt but, in the end, as every new president must, he
shaped the office he had inherited from the perspective of his own experiences
and values.
Upon becoming President, Truman had a far less emotional commitment to
Allied unity than Roosevelt had had; to the son of the isolationist Midwest,
Allied unity represented more of a practical preference than an emotional or
moral necessity. Nor had Truman experienced the exaltation of wartime
partnership with the Soviets, whom in any event he had always viewed warily.
When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, the then Senator Truman rated the two
dictatorships as being morally equivalent, and recommended that America
encourage them to fight to the death: “If we see that Germany is winning, we
ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and
that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler
victorious under any circumstances. Neither of them think anything of their
pledged word.”2
Despite Roosevelt’s deteriorating health, Truman had not been invited to
participate in any of the key foreign policy decisions during his three-month
tenure as Vice-President. Nor had he been briefed about the project to build the
atom bomb.
Truman inherited an international environment whose dividing lines were
inchoately based on the position of armies advancing from east and west. The
political fate of the countries liberated by Allied armies had not yet been
resolved. Most of the traditional Great Powers still had to adjust to their changed
roles. France was prostrate; Great Britain, though victorious, was exhausted;
Germany was being carved into four occupation zones—having haunted Europe
with its strength since 1871, its impotence now threatened it with chaos. Stalin
had advanced the Soviet frontier 600 miles west to the Elbe, while a vacuum was
opening up in front of his armies due to the weakness of Western Europe and the
planned withdrawal of American forces.
Truman’s first instinct was to get along with Stalin, especially since the
American chiefs of staff remained anxious for Soviet participation in the war
against Japan. Although he had been put off by Molotov’s intransigent behavior
at his first encounter with the Soviet Foreign Minister in April 1945, he ascribed
the difficulties to a difference in historical experience. “We have to get tough
with Russians,” Truman said. “They don’t know how to behave. They are like
bulls in a china shop. They are only twenty-five years old. We are over a
hundred and the British are centuries older. We have got to teach them how to
behave.”3
It was a characteristically American statement. Starting out from an
assumption of underlying harmony, Truman ascribed disagreements with the
Soviets not to conflicting geopolitical interests but to “misbehavior” and
“political immaturity.” In other words, he believed in the possibility of
propelling Stalin to “normal” conduct. Coming to grips with the reality, that the
tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States had not been caused by
some misunderstanding but were in fact generic, was the story of the beginning
of the Cold War.
Truman inherited Roosevelt’s top advisers, and he began his presidency
intending to pursue his predecessor’s conception of the Four Policemen. In an
address on April 16, 1945, four days after taking office, Truman drew a bleak
contrast between world community and chaos and saw no alternative to global
collective security except anarchy. Truman rededicated himself to Roosevelt’s
faith in the special obligation of the wartime Allies to maintain their unity in
order to establish and preserve a new peaceful international order, above all to
defend the principle that international disputes should not be settled by force:
Nothing is more essential to the future peace of the world than continued cooperation of the nations
which had to muster the force necessary to defeat the conspiracy of the axis powers to dominate the
world.
While these great states have a special responsibility to enforce the peace, their responsibility is
based upon the obligations resting upon all states, large and small, not to use force in international
relations except in the defense of law.4
Apparently Truman’s speech-writers did not feel that they owed him much
variety, or perhaps they considered their standard text incapable of improvement,
for they repeated the same point verbatim on April 25, in Truman’s speech to the
organizing conference of the United Nations in San Francisco.
Despite the high-flown rhetoric, hard geopolitical facts were shaping
conditions on the ground. Stalin returned to his old ways of conducting foreign
policy, and demanded payment for his victories in the only currency he took
seriously—territorial control. He understood bargains and might have been
willing to discuss some, but only so long as they involved precise quid pro quos
—such as spheres of interest, or trading limits on communist influence in
Eastern Europe for specific benefits like massive economic assistance. What was
beyond the ken of one of the most unscrupulous leaders ever to have headed a
major country, was the idea of basing foreign policy on collective goodwill or
international law. In Stalin’s view, face-to-face encounters between world leaders
might register a correlation of forces or a calculation of the national interest, but
they could not alter it. He therefore never responded to any of Roosevelt’s or
Churchill’s appeals to return to their wartime camaraderie.
It is possible that the enormous prestige Roosevelt had garnered might have
caused Stalin to moderate his approach for a little while longer. In the end, Stalin
would make concessions only to “objective” reality; to him, diplomacy was but
one aspect of a broader and unavoidable struggle to define the relationship of
forces. Stalin’s problem in dealing with American leaders was that he had great
difficulty comprehending the importance of morality and legalism in their
thinking on foreign policy. Stalin genuinely did not understand why American
leaders should be making such a fuss over the domestic structures of the Eastern
European states, where they had no ostensible strategic interest. The Americans’
stand on principle, unrelated to any concrete interests as these had been
conventionally understood, made Stalin look for ulterior motives. “I am afraid,”
reported Averell Harriman, while serving as Ambassador to Moscow, that
…Stalin does not, and never will, fully understand our interest in a free Poland as a matter of
principle. He is a realist… and it is hard for him to appreciate our faith in abstract principles. It is
difficult for him to understand why we should want to interfere with Soviet policy in a country like
Poland, which he considers so important to Russia’s security, unless we have some ulterior
motive….5
Stalin, a master practitioner of Realpolitik, must have expected America to resist
the new geopolitical balance established by the Red Army’s presence in the
center of the European Continent. A man of iron nerves, he was not given to
making preemptive concessions; he must have reasoned that it was far better to
consolidate the bargaining chips he already held while sitting warily in
possession of his prizes, and to leave it to the Allies to make the next move. And
the only moves Stalin would take seriously were those possessed of
consequences which could be analyzed in terms of risk and reward. When the
Allies failed to exercise any pressure, Stalin simply stayed put.
Stalin displayed toward the United States the same taunting manner he had
adopted toward Hitler in 1940. In 1945, the Soviet Union, debilitated by tens of
millions of casualties and the devastation of a third of its territory, faced an
undamaged America possessing an atomic monopoly; in 1940, it had confronted
a Germany in control of the rest of the Continent. In each case, rather than offer
concessions, Stalin consolidated the Soviet position and tried to bluff his
potential adversaries into believing that he was more likely to march farther west
than to retreat. And in each case, he miscalculated the reaction of his opponents.
In 1940, Molotov’s visit to Berlin had strengthened Hitler’s decision to invade;
in 1945, the same Foreign Minister managed to transform American goodwill
into the confrontation of the Cold War.
Churchill understood Stalin’s diplomatic calculations and sought to counter
them by making two moves of his own. He urged an early summit of the three
wartime Allies to bring matters to a head before the Soviet sphere was
consolidated. Pending that, he wanted the Allies to get into their hands as many
bargaining chips as possible. He saw an opportunity for this in the fact that
Allied and Soviet armies had met farther east than had been foreseen, and that,
as a result, Allied forces were in control of nearly a third of the area assigned to
the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany, including most of the industrialized
portion. Churchill proposed using this territory as leverage in the forthcoming
negotiations. On May 4, 1945, he cabled instructions to Foreign Secretary Eden,
who was about to meet Truman in Washington:
…the Allies ought not to retreat from their present positions to the occupational line until we are
satisfied about Poland, and also about the temporary character of the Russian occupation of
Germany, and the conditions to be established in the Russianised or Russian-controlled countries in
the Danube valley, particularly Austria and Czechoslovakia, and the Balkans.6
The new American administration, however, was no more hospitable to British
Realpolitik than Roosevelt’s had been. The patterns of wartime diplomacy were,
therefore, repeated. American leaders were happy enough to agree to a summit
scheduled at Potsdam, near Berlin, for the second half of July. But Truman was
not yet willing to accept Churchill’s suggestion that the way to deal with Stalin
was to assemble rewards and penalties in order to produce the desired result.
Indeed, the Truman Administration proved just as eager as its predecessor to
teach Churchill that the days of balance-of-power diplomacy were irrevocably
past.
At the end of June, less than a month before the planned summit, American
forces withdrew to the agreed demarcation line, leaving Great Britain no other
choice than to follow their example. Moreover, just as Roosevelt had vastly
overestimated British capabilities, the Truman Administration envisaged itself in
the role of mediator between Great Britain and the Soviet Union. Determined to
avoid any impression of ganging up on Stalin, Truman, to Churchill’s chagrin,
rejected an invitation to stop in Great Britain on the way to Potsdam, to celebrate
the Anglo-American victory.
Truman, however, had no inhibition about seeing Stalin without Churchill.
Using the same pretext that Roosevelt had invoked when he tried to arrange the
Bering Straits meeting—that, unlike Churchill, he had never met Stalin—he
proposed a separate meeting with the Soviet ruler. But Churchill turned out to be
just as sensitive about being excluded from a Soviet-American dialogue as
Truman’s advisers had been about giving the impression that Washington and
London were acting in tandem. According to Truman’s memoirs, Churchill
testily notified Washington that he would not attend any summit which was a
continuation of a conference between Truman and Stalin.7 To carry out his role
as self-appointed mediator and to establish direct contact with the leaders of the
Allies, Truman decided to send emissaries to London and Moscow.
Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s old confidant, was dispatched to Moscow; the
envoy sent to see Churchill was, curiously enough, selected more on account of
his ability to reassure Stalin than for his demonstrated skills at exploring what
was on the British Prime Minister’s mind. He was Joseph E. Davies, the prewar
ambassador to Moscow who had written the best-selling book Mission to
Moscow.
Though Davies was an investment banker, hence in communist eyes an archcapitalist, he had developed the propensity of most American envoys—
especially of non-career diplomats—to turn into self-appointed spokesmen for
the countries to which they are accredited. Davies’ book about his ambassadorial
adventures had parroted Soviet propaganda on every conceivable subject,
including the guilt of the victims of the purge trials. Sent by Roosevelt on a
wartime mission to Moscow, the egregiously miscast Davies had had the
extraordinary insensitivity to show a movie based on his best-seller to a group of
top Soviet leaders at the American embassy. The official report noted dryly that
the Soviet guests had watched with “glum curiosity” as the guilt of their former
colleagues was proclaimed from the screen.8 (And well they might have. Not
only did they know better, but they could not discount the possibility that the
film might well be depicting their own futures.) Truman, therefore, could hardly
have sent anyone to Downing Street less likely to appreciate Churchill’s view of
the postwar world.
Davies’ visit to London in late May of 1945 proved nearly as surreal as his
wartime mission to Moscow had been. Davies was far more interested in
continuing America’s partnership with the Soviet Union than in fostering AngloAmerican relations. Churchill expounded to the American envoy his fear that
Stalin intended to swallow up Central Europe, and stressed the necessity of a
united Anglo-American front to resist him. Davies reacted to Churchill’s
analysis of the Soviet challenge by sardonically asking the Old Lion whether
perhaps “he and Britain had made a mistake in not supporting Hitler, for as I
understood him, he was now expressing the doctrine which Hitler and Goebbels
had been proclaiming and reiterating for the past four years in an effort to break
up Allied unity and ‘divide and conquer.’ ”9 As far as Davies was concerned,
East-West diplomacy would go nowhere unless it was based on the premise of
Stalin’s good faith.
Davies reported back to Truman in the same vein. Whatever Churchill’s
greatness, in Davies’ view he was “first, last, and all the time” a great
Englishman, more interested in preserving England’s position in Europe than in
preserving the peace.10 Admiral Leahy, initially Roosevelt’s, now Truman’s
chief of staff, confirmed that Davies’ view was widely held by endorsing Davies’
report: “This was consistent with our staff estimate of Churchill’s attitude
throughout the war.”11
Nothing better illustrates America’s knee-jerk reaction to Realpolitik Davies
and Leahy were vocally displeased that the British Prime Minister should be
primarily concerned with British national interests—something that the
statesmen of any other country would have treated as the most natural thing in
the world. Even though Churchill’s pursuit of a balance of power on the
Continent incarnated three centuries of British history, Americans viewed it as
being somehow aberrant, and contrasted the quest for peace with the effort to
maintain such a balance—as if means and ends were incompatible rather than
complementary.
Hopkins, who had visited Moscow several times as a wartime emissary, found
the atmosphere of his parallel mission extremely congenial. Even so, it is
possible that his meetings with Stalin unintentionally deepened the deadlock
over Eastern Europe and hastened the onset of the Cold War. For Hopkins
followed his wartime pattern of emphasizing harmony over confrontation. He
could not bring himself to impart to Stalin the extent to which his course was
risking serious trouble with an aroused American public. Throughout his
diplomatic career, Hopkins operated on the premise that all disagreements would
dissolve in an atmosphere of understanding and goodwill—categories for which
Stalin had very little comprehension to begin with.
Stalin saw Hopkins on six separate occasions in late May and early June.
Applying his usual technique of placing his interlocutor on the defensive, Stalin
complained about the termination of Lend-Lease and the general cooling off of
Soviet-American relations. He warned that the Soviet Union would never yield
to pressure—a standard diplomatic ploy that is used when the negotiator is
searching for a face-saving means of determining what concessions are wanted
without suggesting that he will accept them. Stalin purported not to understand
America’s concern about holding free elections in Poland. After all, the Soviet
Union had not raised a comparable issue with respect to Italy and Belgium,
where elections had also not yet been held. Why should the Western powers
concern themselves with Poland and the countries of the Danube basin, which
were located so close to the Soviet borders?
Hopkins and Stalin fenced inconclusively without Hopkins ever managing to
convey to Stalin that Americans were deadly serious about the issue of Eastern
European self-determination. Indeed, Hopkins exhibited the proclivity of most
American negotiators to put forward even their most strongly held positions in a
manner which avoids any suggestion of intransigence. Expecting compromise,
they look for ways to give their interlocutors a graceful way out. The reverse
side of this approach is that, once American negotiators lose faith in the other
side’s goodwill, they tend to turn intractable and at times excessively rigid.
The weaknesses of Hopkins’ negotiating style were magnified by the
extraordinary reservoir of goodwill toward Stalin and the Soviet Union that had
been left over from the wartime alliance. By June 1945, Stalin had already
unilaterally fixed Poland’s eastern as well as western border, brutally promoted
Soviet puppets in the government, and flagrantly violated his pledge at Yalta to
organize free elections. Even so, Harry Hopkins found it possible to describe
Soviet-American disagreements to Stalin as “a train of events, each unimportant
in themselves[, that] had grown up around the Polish question.”12 Relying on
Roosevelt’s tactic from the days of Teheran and Yalta, he asked Stalin to modify
his demands in Eastern Europe to help ease domestic pressures on the Truman
Administration.
Stalin professed to be open to suggestions about how to make the new Polish
government consistent with American principles. He invited Hopkins to
recommend four or five individuals from the democratic side who might be
added to the Warsaw government, which he claimed had been created by the
Soviet Union due to the “compulsion” of military necessity.13 Of course, token
participation in a communist government was not the real issue; free elections
were. And the communists had already demonstrated a remarkable skill at
destroying coalition governments. In any event, Hopkins could not have
impressed Stalin with America’s grasp of the Polish situation when he admitted
that he had no specific names to suggest for the new government.
In insisting on a free hand vis-à-vis his neighbors, Stalin was following
traditional Russian practice. From the time Russia had emerged on the
international scene two centuries earlier, its leaders had been attempting to settle
disputes with their neighbors bilaterally rather than at international conferences.
Neither Alexander I in the 1820s, Nicholas I thirty years later, nor Alexander II
in 1878 understood why Great Britain insisted on interposing itself between
Russia and Turkey. In these and subsequent instances, Russian leaders took the
position that they were entitled to a free hand in dealing with their neighbors. If
thwarted, they tended to resort to force. And once having resorted to force, they
never withdrew unless they were threatened with war.
The visits of Truman’s emissaries to London and Moscow proved, above all,
that he was still trying to steer a course between Roosevelt’s view of how to
maintain the peace, in which America had no partners, and his growing
resentment of Soviet conduct in Eastern Europe, for which he as yet had no
policy. Truman was not ready to face the geopolitical realities victory had
wrought, or to jettison Roosevelt’s vision of a world order governed by the Four
Policemen. Nor would America yet concede that the balance of power was a
necessity of the international order and not an aberration of European diplomacy.
Roosevelt’s dream of the Four Policemen came to an end at the Potsdam
Conference, which lasted from July 17 to August 2, 1945. The three leaders met
at the Cecilienhof, a cavernous, English-style country house set in a large park
which had served as the residence of the last German crown prince. Potsdam was
chosen as the site of the conference because it was in the Soviet zone of
occupation, was accessible by rail (Stalin hated to fly), and could be protected by
Soviet security forces.
When the American delegation arrived, it was still committed to the wartime
view of a new world order. The State Department briefing paper, which served
as the touchstone for the American delegation, asserted that the establishment of
spheres of interest would be the greatest threat to world peace. Invoking
Wilsonian orthodoxy, the paper argued that spheres of interest would “represent
power politics pure and simple, with all the concomitant disadvantages…. Our
primary objective should be to remove the causes which make nations feel that
such spheres are necessary to build their security, rather than to assist one
country to build up strength against another.”14 The State Department did not
explain what, in the absence of power politics, might encourage Stalin to
compromise, or what the cause of the conflict might be if it was not clashing
interests. Nevertheless, the ubiquitous Joseph Davies, who came along as the
President’s adviser on the Soviet leaders, seemed pleased enough with his own
recommendation—which amounted to indulging Stalin. At one point, after an
intense exchange, Davies slipped a note to Truman which said: “I think Stalin’s
feelings are hurt, please be nice to him.”15
Coddling people, especially communists, did not come naturally to Truman.
Still, he gave it a heroic try. Initially he appreciated Stalin’s curt style more than
he did Churchill’s eloquence. As he wrote to his mother: “Churchill talks all the
time and Stalin just grunts but you know what he means.”16 At a private dinner
on July 21, Truman pulled out all the stops, later confiding to Davies: “…I
wanted to convince him that we are ‘on the level’ and interested in peace and a
decent world, and had no purposes hostile to them; that we wanted nothing for
ourselves, but security for our country, and peace with friendship and
neighborliness, and that it was our joint job to do that. I ‘spread it on thick,’ and I
think he believes me. I meant every word of it.”17 Unfortunately, Stalin had no
frame of reference for interlocutors who proclaimed their disinterestedness in the
issues before them.
The leaders at the Potsdam Conference sought to avoid the organizational
problems that had plagued the Versailles Conference. Rather than getting bogged
down in details and working under time constr